Advice for MOCA's Next Director: Show the Pollocks

Jackson Pollock, No. 1, 1949. MOCA, the Rita and Taft Schreiber Collection

In July MOCA announced that director Johanna Burton would be departing for the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia. Burton becomes the fifth MOCA director to leave since 2008. Going by the numbers, Burton was a successful director. She oversaw the resumption of the exhibition program and the fiscally important annual gala. An Olafur Eliasson exhibition was both a critical favorite and an immersive popular attraction. A groundbreaking historical survey of Photorealism and its successors was the type of historical-but-relevant show that MOCA was once famous for. Burton helped shepherd "MONUMENTS," the exhibition built around decommissioned Confederate monuments and contemporary artists' reactions to them. It's certain to be one of the most discussed shows this fall.

Any museum would be fortunate to organize and present these three shows in near-succession. But the tone of the editorializing about Burton's departure is that MOCA is a failed institution.

MOCA was founded in the 1980s as the city's preeminent venue for contemporary art. Forty years later, MOCA is in the shadow of the cross-street Broad and the cross-town Hammer. Every day people queue for the Broad's standby line, while MOCA almost never has a line and rarely more than a few people in a gallery at once. It's not the ticket prices: Both institutions offer free general admission. 

The Broad is planning an expansion, just a decade after its opening in a starchitect building. MOCA is in the same two buildings it's had since the 1980s. 

There is a cottage industry of supplying gratuitous advice. Writing in Forbes, Tom Teicholz offers a "suggestion, or prediction: MOCA should come under the umbrella of the Broad… Whether this means a merger, a takeover, or just a management collaboration agreement—I'll leave that to the lawyers."

Museum mergers rarely happen unless one partner is on life support. As far as I can tell, MOCA isn't there yet. A merger would create a three-building complex when MOCA is struggling with two. MOCA's two buildings are smaller than they should be, more beloved than practical. They are too far apart to encourage walking between them, and too close together to expand the museum's geographic scope. They are too architecturally distinguished to expand or abandon. 

So yes, it's possible to imagine an alternate universe in which MOCA draws more visitors and raises more money than it does. But MOCA is boxed in in ways no director can do much about. One thing MOCA's next director can do is to rethink showing of the permanent collection. 

Jasper Johns, Map, 1962. MOCA, gift of Marcia Simon Weisman

MOCA has the only important Jackson Pollock drip painting in Los Angeles. It's rarely on view. MOCA has a great Jasper Johns Map, likewise rarely shown. Were these two paintings owned by almost any other American museum, they would be on view all the time. 

MOCA has impressive suites of works by Rothko, Kline, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Rosenquist, and early Lichtenstein. There are important individual works by Gorky, Krasner, and Warhol. 

It's not that MOCA doesn't exhibit its permanent collection. Right now, Grand Avenue has two big, sprawling collection installations, "Diary of Flowers: Artists and Their Worlds" (through Sep. 20, 2026) and "Fictions of Display" (through Jan. 4, 2026). The latter leverages the work of Claes Oldenburg and his early 1960s The Store, many elements of which MOCA acquired as part of the Panza collection. The Oldenburg works are shown in the context of more recent artists mining the vein of simulacra. It's a smart, nuanced show that says a lot about art now and art back then. 

Installation view of "Fictions of Display," with Sherrie Levine's La Fortune (After Man Ray: 2)

Contemporary art museums often feel a tension between exhibiting the newest art and recognizing the history of art preceding it. At one point New York's Museum of Modern Art figured it would give away artworks once they ceased to be "modern." It didn't, of course. Old-fashioned van Goghs and Matisses are now among MoMA's biggest draws. 

MOCA's collection spans the postwar period to the present—80 years of art history. The institution has yet to figure out how to deal with that. I imagine that part of the reason is the limited exhibition space. 

MOCA's holdings of the New York School, Pop, and Minimalism are unmatched in the West. These works deserve to be on view much more than they are. There is room to show them at Grand Ave. (were it a priority) or even at the Geffen Contemporary (if and when they ever get the climate and security right). Failing that, the works might be put on long-term loan to the expanded Broad or LACMA.

The work of MOCA's next director will be hemmed in by finite budgets and legacy buildings. But there's no reason a new leader can't find a way to bring more of the collection onto view.

Robert Rauschenberg, Gray Wing, 1959. MOCA, the Panza collection