Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Contemporary art museum in La Jolla, California, United States
The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego occupies a 3-acre oceanfront campus at 700 Prospect Street in La Jolla, centred on an Irving Gill-designed residence built in 1916 for Ellen Browning Scripps. Annabelle Selldorf's expansion, reopened on 9 April 2022, added galleries and a public park. The collection covers art made from 1950 onward, with works by Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly and Claes Oldenburg.
Founded in 1941 in La Jolla as The Art Center in La Jolla, the museum occupied Ellen Browning Scripps's 1915 Irving Gill-designed residence. Renamed the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in the early 1970s, it narrowed its scope to art from 1950 onward. A 1996 Venturi Scott Brown renovation doubled gallery space, and Annabelle Selldorf's expansion reopened on April 9, 2022.
The museum's binational mandate centres on artists from both sides of the US–Mexico border; exhibitions such as Being Here With You / Estando aquí contigo brought together 42 artists from San Diego and Tijuana. In 2023 Celia Álvarez Muñoz and Griselda Rosas showed more than 35 works, including sculptural installations, embroidery and photographic series. The collection holds Pop art, conceptual and minimalist pieces by Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly and Claes Oldenburg.
The entrance sits on the coastal street with nearby parking available for visitors. The grounds include accessible areas at ground level, though stairs connect different levels and elevators are available.
Behind the downtown Jacobs Building, formerly the Santa Fe Depot baggage building of 1915-16, stands Richard Serra's "Santa Fe Depot" (2004): six cube-like steel structures weighing 156 tons in total, commissioned by the museum. The Copley Building's stairwell holds Roman De Salvo's light fixtures made from industrial materials, and outside, Jenny Holzer's truisms run vertically in light-emitting diodes through clear plastic tubes she calls icicles.
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