The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum which has two locations in Los Angeles. The main museum is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The second location is MOCA's original space, initially intended as a temporary exhibit space while the main facility was built. It is now known as the Geffen Contemporary and is located in the Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles. Between 2000 and 2019, it operated a satellite facility at the Pacific Design Center facility in West Hollywood.
The museum's exhibits consist primarily of American and European contemporary art created after 1940. As of 2026, the museum's collection included nearly 8,000 objects. Since the museum's inception, MOCA's programming has been defined by its multi-disciplinary approach to contemporary art.
In a 1979 political fundraising event at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, Councilman Joel Wachs, and local philanthropist Marcia Simon Weisman happened to be seated at the same table. Throughout the evening, Weisman passionately discussed the city's need for a contemporary art museum. Weisman's brother, Norton Simon, had stepped in to bail out the financially ailing Pasadena Art Museum in 1975, but was unable to retain its focus on modern art. Just weeks later, the Mayor's Museum Advisory Committee was organized. The committee, led by William Albert Norris, set about creating a museum from scratch, including locating funds, trustees, directors, curators, a gallery, and most importantly an art collection. Also in 1975, Weisman and five other key local collectors signed an agreement whereby they would pledge chunks of their private collections, worth up to $6 million, "to create a museum of standing and repute."
In 1976, the fledgling Museum of Contemporary Art was operating out of an office on Boyd Street. The city's most prominent philanthropists and collectors had been assembled into a board of trustees in 1980, and set a goal of raising $10 million in their first year; an artists advisory council was involved early on. A working staff was brought together; Richard Koshalek was appointed chief curator; relationships were made with artists and galleries; and negotiations were begun to secure artwork and an exhibition space. Following Weisman's initiative, $1-million contributions from Eli Broad, Max Palevsky, and Atlantic Richfield Co. helped securing the construction of the new museum; Broad became MOCA's founding chairman; Palevsky chaired the architectural search committee. Many of MOCA's initial donors were young and supporting the arts for the first time; a substantial number joined up at the $10,000 "founder" minimum.
Making up well over 90% of the museum's works, gifts from several major private collectors form the cornerstones of MOCA's permanent collection of nearly 6,000 works. Much of it has come from board members who donated or bequeathed key works or entire collections, or sold art to the museum at highly favorable terms.
Included within today's permanent collection are works by further influential artists such as Greg Colson, Kim Dingle, Sam Durant, David Hockney, Kenneth Price, John McLaughlin, Robert Motherwell, Raymond Pettibon, James Hayward, and George Segal. As the Los Angeles Times declared, "There isn't a city in America—not New York, not Chicago, not Houston, not San Francisco—where a more impressive museum collection of contemporary art can be seen."
Within months of its fall 1983 opening, MOCA was able to turn itself into an instant player in the international art world by striking a deal with one of its board members, Giuseppe Panza, who agreed to sell a group of works for $11 million and stagger the payments over five years, interest-free. The 1984 purchase of parts of the Panza Collection encompasses 80 seminal works of abstract expressionism and pop art by Jean Fautrier, Franz Kline, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, and Antoni Tàpies. At the time of the purchase, Panza and his wife turned down many "lucrative cash offers," because they wanted the works to be in a museum, MOCA LA specifically. In 1995, the Panzas donated 70 works - seven each by ten Southern California artists. The Panzas began collecting Los Angeles artists because, "the city always offers new creativity to anyone who approaches it without preconceived notions." Of the donation to the museum, he said "I felt it would be good for MOCA to have some examples of the works my wife and I had acquired. I saw this as a complement to the works from the Panza Collection that MOA has had in its possession for a decade and a half, but in which the art of Los Angeles was not represented." The ten artists in this second donation were Lawrence Carroll, Greg Colson, Jeff Colson, Ron Griffin. Roy Thurston, Mark Lere, Gregory Mahoney. Ross Rudel, Peter Shelton, and Robert Therrien.
In 1985, the museum accepted Michael Heizer's earthwork Double Negative in Nevada desert, donated by Virginia Dwan. A 1986 bequest by television executive Barry Lowen included 67 works of minimalist, post-minimalist and neo-expressionist painting, sculpture, photography and drawing by artists such as Dan Flavin, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Elizabeth Murray, Julian Schnabel, Joel Shapiro, Frank Stella, and Cy Twombly. In 1989, pieces by the Rita and Taft Schreiber collection were donated to the museum, encompassing 18 paintings, sculptures, and drawings by Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, and Arshile Gorky, among others. Hollywood agent Phil Gersh and his wife Beatrice, both founding members, gave 13 important pieces from their collection to the museum the same year, including Pollock's early drip painting Number 3, 1948 and David Smith's 8-foot-tall stainless steel sculpture Cubi III (1961)—as well as works by artists such as Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, and Susan Rothenberg. Finally, the museum's co-founder Marcia Simon Weisman bequeathed 83 works on paper from artists including Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns and California-based painters Richard Diebenkorn and Sam Francis.
In 1991, Hollywood screenwriter Scott Spiegel donated works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Innerst, Robert Longo, Susan Rothenberg, David Salle, among others. In 2003, the museum received the promise of a gift of 33 pieces from advertising executive Clifford Einstein, chair of MOCA's board of trustees, and his wife, Madeline; the proposed donation included works by Kiki Smith, Nam June Paik, Mark Grotjahn, Sigmar Polke, Mike Kelley, and Lari Pittman. In 2004 the museum received the largest group of artworks donated by a private collector in its 25-year history when E. Blake Byrne, a MOCA trustee and retired television executive, gave 123 paintings, sculptures, drawings, videos and photographs by 78 artists. Over the years, major donations of art collections have come from the Lannan Foundation and through funding from the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.
During the 2000s, under director Jeremy Strick, MOCA expanded its holdings of installation, video, conceptual art and work by Los Angeles artists. Some 2,000 works were added during Strick's term, expanding the collection by one-third. Major additions in 2001 included large-scale works by Nancy Rubins, Paul McCarthy, Gabriel Orozco and Mona Hatoum, William Kentridge's Medicine Chest, and a gift of 37 photographs by James Welling. In 2003, the museum acquired Ed Ruscha's Chocolate Room, originally created for the 1970 Venice Biennale, including surviving materials, documentation and the exclusive right to reconstruct the installation. The largest addition of the decade was E. Blake Byrne's 2004 gift of 123 works by 78 artists, including John Baldessari, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Marlene Dumas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Yayoi Kusama and Felix Gonzalez-Torres; it was then the largest group of artworks donated to MOCA by a private collector. Later acquisitions included joint ownership with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of Chris Burden's Hell Gate in 2006, Clifford and Madeline Einstein's promised gift of 33 works in 2007, and 50 predominantly Minimalist and Conceptual works received in 2008 through Dorothy and Herbert Vogel's Fifty Works for Fifty States project.