Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
art museum in Los Angeles, California
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.
Founding
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.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles” is art museum in Los Angeles, California. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Museum, Contemporary and Angeles, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “art museum in Los Angeles, California” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1134646. VIAF identifies the subject as 142805637. The Library of Congress control number is n83206447. Authority coordinates are 34.053, -118.250. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2019, 1940 and 2026.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.