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Works from the Museum’s Renowned Collection Continue to Engage Visitors
New on View: “Celestial and Terrestrial Worlds” and Land and Sea
March 3, 2025 - SAN DIEGO - New on View features work from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s (MCASD) permanent collection, presented with a themed approach to engage visitors. Two new themed presentations are featured.
Curated by Kathryn Kanjo, David C. Copley Executive Director and CEO, the inaugural presentation is organized around the theme “Celestial and Terrestrial Worlds,” and presents works by such noted artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Maya Lin, and Byron Kim.
MCASD joins an international roster of institutions commemorating Robert Rauschenberg’s 100th birthday (1925–2008). Rauschenberg’s conviction that contemporary art can nurture people’s sensibilities as individuals, community members, and citizens was key to his ethos. The Centennial celebrations seek to allow audiences familiar with him and those encountering the artist for the first time to form fresh perspectives about his artwork.
A year of global activities and exhibitions in honor of Rauschenberg’s Centennial reexamines the artist through a contemporary lens, highlighting his enduring influence on generations of artists and advocates for social progress. The Centennial’ s activation of the artist’s legacy promotes cross-disciplinary explorations and creates opportunities for critical dialogue. Learn more by visiting rauschenberg100.org.
The additional works on display evoke the ways we see and understand the celestial and terrestrial worlds. From distanced views provided by technology to tightly focused observation—as in Mary Weatherford's Her Insomnia—precision gives way to abstraction. Underfoot, Maya Lin represents the earth’s circumference with a three-ringed panorama. Overhead, Sara Genn “builds” a sky with celestial shades of blue that are also the names of popular, earthly songs. Trevor Paglen’s stealth drone is absorbed in a sublime skyscape. Robert Rauschenberg layers flying machines of all sorts in his historic prints, created around the Apollo 11 space launch. Bryan Hunt's lunar relief recalls the artist's early experience working as a draftsman at NASA in the late 1960s. Similarly, Byron Kim's monochromatic canvas—an aquatic horizon marked by a container ship—alludes to the engineering feat of the 100-year-old Panama Canal.
On view in Richard D. Marshall Gallery and nearby Marcia Foster Hazan View Gallery
New on View: Land and Sea, opening March 20
In recent years, MCASD has expanded its collection with land and seascapes by artists with connections to our region. Organized by senior curator Jill Dawsey, PhD, Land and Sea: Selections from the Collection, features new acquisitions alongside beloved pieces that use the visual vocabulary of landscape to explore local and global concerns. In a new installation commissioned by MCASD, Fox Maxy (Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians and Payómkawichum) embeds her digital film Blood Materials (2021)—a meditation on the idea of home—in a sculptural frame that emulates the craggy inclines of the La Jolla coast. In a similar spirit, intimate monotypes by Gail Werner (Cupeño, Kumeyaay, Luiseño, and enrolled member Pala Band of Mission Indians) depict cactus seeds, seashells, and other symbols evoking the stories and traditions of Native people of Southern California. Jeanne Dunn’s animate landscape painting portrays what she describes as “the agency of trees,” underscoring the role forests play in reducing climate change. Margaret Noble’s live-feed video installation Horizon (2024) uses common materials to produce the illusion of a sun setting on the ocean, prompting reflections on how technology shapes—and sometimes substitutes for—our experience of the natural world.
Land and Sea pays tribute to the distinguished coastal site on which MCASD sits, which is layered with history told through land and sea. This seaside location is the ancestral homeland of the Kumeyaay Nation, which was first colonized by Spain, then incorporated as part of Mexico, before the United States claimed the territory as its own and renamed it California. Turning to the historic genre of landscape, contemporary artists engage with land and sea as a way of connecting this past to our present. Their wide-ranging explorations of landscape recover familial heritage, unearth histories of settlement and displacement, and highlight the fragile beauty of the natural world that we call home.
On view in Parker Gallery and nearby Fayman Gallery beginning March 20
Artists: Diedrick Brackens, Andrea Chung, Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Janet Cooling, Kim Dingle, Jeanne Dunn, Raúl Guerrero, the Harrisons, Fox Maxy, Margaret Noble, Marta Palau, John Pfahl, Philipp Scholz Ritterman, Gail Roberts, Sandy Rodriguez, Lynn Schuette, Ernest R. Silva, Vaughn Spann, Perry Vasquez, Kay Walkingstick, Dana Washington-Queen, Gail Werner
More about Fox Maxy:
Fox Maxy (Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians and Payómkawichum, born 1992) creates experimental digital films that draw from an archive of footage the local artist-filmmaker has captured and compiled since she was a teenager. A new acquisition for the MCASD collection, the digital film Blood Materials (2021) intercuts vintage footage of the San Diego coastline—from the Ocean Beach pier, to the La Jolla cove, and beyond—with digital video of desert locales in Anza Borrego and the Mesa Grande Reservation in northeast San Diego County where the artist resides. Maxy animates this footage with computer graphics to produce her signature kaleidoscopic imagery and sets it to an asynchronous mixtape-style soundtrack.
Akin to a natural history diorama, the film’s sculptural frame simulates the beaches below the Museum, whose sand and rocks are the “blood materials” referenced in the title. Maxy describes Blood Materials as a loving ode to San Diego, yet she refers to the work and all of her films as "horror movies.” Even as Blood Materials revels in the beauty of the mountains, valleys, ocean, and desert, its underlying premise is the displacement and genocide of the people who once moved freely and migrated seasonally through these ecological zones.
Upcoming Exhibitions:
An Artful Life: A Tribute to Matthew C. Strauss (March 20, 2025, to August 3, 2025)
Yan Pei-Ming: A Burial in Shanghai (April 17, 2025, to January 4, 2026)
ABOUT MCASD
The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is the region’s foremost forum devoted to the exploration and presentation of the art of today. Open since 1941, we welcome all audiences to reflect on their lives, communities, and the ever-changing world through the powerful prism of contemporary art. We showcase an internationally recognized collection. MCASD’s dynamic exhibition schedule features a vast array of media in an unprecedented variety of spaces, along with a growing dedication to community experiences and public programs. As a cultural hub, MCASD seeks to catalyze conversation in our region. www.mcasd.org
VISIT: MCASD La Jolla, 700 Prospect St, La Jolla, 92037
MEDIA CONTACT: TR/PR | Toni Robin
tr@trprsandiego.com, 858.483.3918
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Top: Photography: Kat Caudle for Stacy Keck Photo LLC