Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

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