 |
| Do-Ho Suh, Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/Baltimore Home/London Home/Seattle Home/L.A. Home/L.A. Home, 1999. Museum of Contemporary Art |
MOCA's latest permanent collection installation, "Diaries of Flowers: Artists and their Worlds," presents about 80 works loosely organized around artistic world-building. The first gallery deploys Arata Isozaki's pyramid as a perfect container for Do-Ho Suh's Seoul Home…, an ethereal recreation of the artist's childhood home in Seoul. The label frames the simulated home as a site for "longing, loss, and memory," connecting the 1999 piece to the 2025 wildfire displacements.
 |
| Installation view with Robert Gober's Untitled, right background |
 |
| Jim Hodges, A Diary of Flowers—Above the Clouds, 1995 |
Longing, loss, and the 1990s are leitmotifs, though the show covers over six decades. The exhibition's title is taken from Jim Hodges' A Diary of Flowers—Above the Clouds, an installation of a hundred flower drawings, ballpoint ink on paper napkins. The fragile medium and the short-lived blossoms are emblematic of the AIDS epidemic.
 |
| Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autorretrato Ciego, 2007-08 |
Hodges' piece has a shadow of sorts in Abraham Cruzvillegas' Autorretrato Ciego (Blind Self-Portrait). The artist collected the ephemera of his life and painted them black.
 |
| Dr. Lakra, Untitled (La imponente personalidad de Liz Campbell), 2023 |
That and a sculptural installation by Cruzvillegas dominate a room exploring Mexico City's resurgent art scene of the 1990s onward. MOCA has a select representation of this period, allowing a one-room Museum of Underrated Mexican Modernists. Artists include Dr. Lakra, Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega, Eduardo Abaroa, and Sofía Táboas.
 |
| Tomas Osinski, Reconstruction, 1982 |
Another unexpected theme room covers a 1982 cultural exchange between early MOCA (under founding director Pontus Hultén) and Poland. MOCA acquired works by 15 Polish artists, and the Museum Sztuki, Lódz, added Americans. The exchanged works were shown in Paris in 1982, prior to MOCA's 1983 opening. "Diary of Flowers" offers the first substantial showing of the Polish works in Los Angeles. In Reconstruction Tomas Osinsky restores a tree trunk based on tangents: a cartoon of the oversimplistic projections that drive public decision making.
"Diary of Flowers" is at MOCA Grand Avenue through Jan. 4, 2026. Clara Kim curated, with Paul Kroll and Ariana Rizo.
 |
| Installation view of Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency |
 |
| Haegue Yang, Strange Fruit, 2012-13. On back wall: Louise Nevelson, Sky Cathedral/Southern Mountain, 1959 |
 |
| Candice Lin, Xternesta, 2022 |
Candace Lin's
Xternesta is two nature spirits in glazed ceramic, one displaying the artist's alchemic recipe book. Niches display tinctures, salves, succulents, and copper sulfate crystals.
 |
| Lucas Samaras, Box #43, 1966 |
Lucas Samaras meets Joseph Cornell in his
Box #43. It dates from 1966, the year of Cornell's first retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum and Guggenheim (organized by Walter Hopps).
 |
| Belkis Ayón, Resurección, 1998 |
Resurección is an Afro-Cuban altarpiece that is also a work on paper (collagraph printed on nine sheets). The superheroic figures are avatars of princess Sikán, female protagonist of the all-male Abakuá society.
Resurección was a gift of the artist.
Comments
Trying to find an affordable monograph of his cloth sculpture is harder than finding a Bitcoin between my couch cushions.
> much unused wall space?!
That always makes me think that a museum has more space than it knows what to do with. Curators believe a lot of blank white wall space is somehow a sign of trendy sophistication. Or sophisticated for sophisticated's sake. Or just the opposite of the Louvre, which crams even the proverbial kitchen sink into its massive amount of square footage.
MOCA's big weakness, regardless of what's on display, is it's too small. And since the Geffen Temporary is separate from the Izosaki building on Grand Ave, the two don't really work together.
Even the larger Broad across the street could use the additional wall/floor space it's supposed to start adding this year.
Say more. Your meaning eludes me.
Accordingly, the curatorial support has also waned, suggesting that others see what I see. There's not much there.
You can test this for yourself. There are many artists working with this theme, more generally of "domesticity spatialized" or more specifically of "ghostly buildings." One of the most prominent is younger and will be featured in a "single artist" presentation at the Glenstone museum. It used to be that collabs at the Whitney/MOMA were the best tells of curatorial support, but today it's the Glenstone museum. They are much more selective.
On that note, the artist in question is also collaborating on the forthcoming Lichtenstein retrospective at the Whitney. Looking forward to that.
--- J. Garcin.
I know what I like. And I loves me my Do Ho Suh.
*
I've been meaning to go to Glenstone for many years.
But if I'm too lazy to drive 20 miles outside DC to visit there, then what makes some crazy Chinamen in Shanghai think I'd ever schlep 60 miles to Santa Ana to see a Shanghai Museum outpost when I'm visiting LA?
Mr. Frick did not find all the best pictures himself. And neither did you. Someone had to tell you that Rembrandt, Vermeer, et al. were worth seeing.
If you see a contemporary artist at a museum or major gallery, a curator has already made that decision for you. Only the most astute collectors, the ones who buy an artist's work before everyone else starts buying, can truly say that they know what they like.
--- J. Garcin
Did "someone" have to tell the first Native Americans that viewed the Grand Canyon to appreciate it?
Just because a curator fashions a show doesn't mean he's made up my mind. I will like it if I alone like it.
Many a show's reviews have been horrid, but I loved it.
It is not my job to worry about what other people think.