In 1969, MCASD devoted itself to the acquisition and exhibition of twentieth-century art, collecting new works by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Miriam Shapiro, Larry Bell, and Agnes Martin. Now, almost sixty years later, the collection has grown to represent the increasing multiplicity of contemporary art, taking an expansive look across time periods and national borders.

This inaugural installation collection of the MCASD’s collection is organized by Kathryn Kanjo, The David C. Copley Director and CEO, and former Associate Curator Anthony Graham.

Notable installations by Vito Acconci (1940-2017) and Gary Simmons (b. 1964) anchor a new display of MCASD’s collection that also includes works by Amy Adler (b. 1966), Terry Allen (b. 1943), Sadie Barnette (b. 1984), Rafael Canogar (b. 1935), Allen Sekula (1951–2013), and William E. Jones (b. 1962).

Acconci’s Instant House (1980) will be displayed in MCASD for the first time since its recent presentation at The Broad in Los Angeles.

With allusions to labor, play, war and peace, the works on view evoke memories of an American past. Acconci’s interactive sculpture, assembled from multiple cloth flags, combines youthful memories playhouses and park swings into an adult meditation on global politics. Nearly erased from view, an isolated gazebo haunts Simmon’s massive blackboard drawing.

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.

In Richard D. Marshall Gallery and nearby Marcia Foster Hazan View Gallery, works 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 roses—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.

MCASD joins an international roster of institutions commemorating Robert Rauschenberg’s 100th birthday (1925–2008). Rauschenberg’s conviction that engagement with 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 art work.

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.

Can light be a medium of art? In the 1960s and 70s, a group of loosely-associated artists working in and around Los Angeles began exploring that very question. This artistic movement of Light and Space investigated the varied methods of directing natural and artificial light, as well as the spectrum of light's perceptual properties. For this inaugural presentation, three galleries highlight the endeavors of the Light and Space movement: Pfister Gallery, Fox Gallery, and Krichman Family Gallery.

Featured in Pfister Gallery, Larry Bell and Mary Corse explored the refractive ability of glass, working in different visual vocabularies, using the medium to direct, reflect, and diffuse light. Others, like Craig Kauffman and De Wain Valentine, employed Plexiglas, fiberglass, and resin in order to create what was called "Finish Fetish." This choice of materials was in part inspired by the industrial shine and gloss of Los Angeles's urban landscape.

In Fox Gallery, the work of Southern Californian practitioners is shown alongside their East Coast peers. The illusionistic treatment of line and color in the Minimalist work of New York-based artists like Donald Judd finds affinity with Californian experiments in perception.

Inspired by the everyday, Pop Art is frequently identified by its appropriation of popular imagery and familiar objects. Often repurposed for satirical ends, images and phrases were clipped, copied, and consumed from all available sources of media. The United States' thriving consumerism and obsession with celebrity were both stimulants and sources of critique for artists. Cohn Gallery displays the distinct yet simultaneous developments of a pop aesthetics in the coastal scenes of Los Angeles and New York.

On the West Coast, Pop was paired with a tendency towards conceptualism, inflected more by the mundane and humorous than the fame and commercialization which preoccupied artists in New York. Cohn Gallery features the Museum's signature pieces of Pop Art, which epitomize the difference in aesthetic and approach found on each coast.

Working with the visual vocabularies of abstraction and Minimalism, many of the works in Carson Royston Gallery meditate on tone, geometry, and simplicity of material. Compelled by questions of sensory perception, these artworks play with optical illusion and pictorial tension. The surfaces of these monochromatic works record the friction of encounter between artist and object. Canvases display the impasto of paint layers and salience of line, while industrial objects weld and hinge into organic forms, emoting beyond the rigidity of their materials. Conversing through a rhyming of visual forms, the pieces in this space explore abstraction across multiple channels of influence.

Beginning in the late 1950s, artistic experimentation moved towards an explicit concentration on color, line, and form. Painted, stained, pushed, and printed, color mindfully makes its way in and onto the artworks in Foster Family Gallery through a diverse array of applications and artistic methods. Concurrent moments of abstraction proliferated in pockets of the country and in the artistic centers of New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. The oily hard-edges of Frank Stella's circle grew out of traditional artistic methods, whereas the dancing-dyed forms of Sam Gilliam move the canvas off the wall, innovating shape and pigmentation. These varied abstractions chromatically bounce from the Museum's earliest holdings to works by contemporary Color Field painters in Bloom Gallery.

Stanley and Pauline Foster Gallery, Meyer Gallery, and Krichman Family Gallery are dedicated to Robert Irwin (1928–2023), a key figure in the Light and Space Movement. The works comprise a brief survey of Irwin's artistic trajectory, ranging from his early formation in abstract expressionist painting to his now-iconic perceptual experiments with light. MCASD's relationship with the artist began in 1969, when the institution mounted his first museum exhibition. Today, with ten installations, eight paintings, seven sculptures, and thirty drawings by Irwin housed in the permanent collection, MCASD maintains the largest institutional holdings of the artist's work.