Museum of Contemporary Art

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Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. Museum devoted to art since 1940, opened in 1979. Pontus Hulten was the first director. The founders and benefactors have included several prominent local collectors of modern art, among them Robert A. Rowen (1910– ), Taft Schreiber (1908–76) and his wife Rita Bloch Schreiber (1909–89), and Marcia Weisman (née Simon) (1918– ), sister of Norton Simon, the famous collector of Old Masters, and wife at this time (they divorced in 1981) of fellow-collector Frederick R. Weisman (1912– ) (the Weismans are the subject of a double portrait by David Hockney, 1968). In 1983 the museum moved into temporary accommodation in a large warehouse converted by the American architect Frank O. Gehry, and in 1986 into its present home—a striking Postmodernist building by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. It has a large permanent collection, particularly rich in American art, and also holds temporary exhibitions. Other exhibitions are held in the warehouse building, which is now an adjunct of the main museum and known as Temporary Contemporary (in 1996 it was renamed Geffen Contemporary in honour of the recording executive David Geffen, who gave $5 million to the museum). Its size and uncluttered spaces make it particularly suitable for displaying large works.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Museum founded in 1967 by a group of art lovers in Chicago who thought that the city's major gallery, the Art Institute, gave insufficient representation to modern art. It opened that year in a turn-of-the century building in East Ontario Street that was originally a bakery and had later been the home of Playboy Enterprises. The building was modernized and the exterior was embellished with a large copper frieze by Zoltan Kemeny. In 1977 the museum expanded into an adjacent building, and in 1996 it moved to a large new building designed by the German architect Josef Paul Kleinhues in a park-like setting near Lake Michigan. The museum was established to cover ‘the untried, the unproved, the problematical, and the controversial’ in art, and from the first has mounted a broad-ranging exhibition programme covering diverse fields. It has also built up a large permanent collection.