2025 exhibition program

Season highlights include the much-anticipated MONUMENTS, which juxtaposes decommissioned Confederate statues with contemporary artworks; and MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi, the artist’s first solo museum show in Los Angeles. 

Additional highlights include Diary of Flowers: Artists and their Worlds, an exhibition exploring how artists construct imaginative and personal networks; Tracing Performance, Fictions of Display, showcasing collection works that consider the relationship between objects, theater, and performance; and the U.S. debut of Wael Shawky’s acclaimed Drama 1882.
 

Offering a dynamic array of perspectives and a wide-ranging program, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is pleased to announce its 2025 exhibition schedule. The museum’s season invites visitors to engage with artistic visions and artworks that reflect and respond to the stories shaping our times. The program weaves together ambitious collection-based exhibitions and solo presentations by leading contemporary artists, experimental thematic shows, and provocative explorations of history through contemporary art.

At MOCA Grand Avenue, Diary of Flowers: Artists and their Worlds (March 2, 2025–January 4, 2026) showcases over 80 works from the museum’s celebrated collection, exploring how artists construct imaginative, intimate, and alternative networks. The third installment of the relaunched MOCA Focus series, MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi (June 29, 2025–March 15, 2026), presents the Los Angeles–based artist’s ornate and stylized paintings in her first solo museum show in the city. Tracing Performance, Fictions of Display (June 29, 2025 – March 15, 2026) highlights works from the permanent collection by more than two dozen artists that consider the rich relationships between objects, theater, and performance. 

At MOCA Geffen, Wael Shawky: Drama 1882 (February 20–March 16, 2025) has its U.S. debut following a widely praised presentation at the 2024 Venice Biennale. The operatic film installation explores historical counter-narratives as part of Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs. Fall brings the much-anticipated exhibition MONUMENTS (October 23, 2025–May 24, 2026), co-organized by MOCA and The Brick (formerly LAXART). Juxtaposing decommissioned Confederate monuments with contemporary artworks, MONUMENTS invites audiences to reflect on the evolving meanings of these highly charged symbols and their implications in the present day.

Johanna Burton, Maurice Marciano Director of MOCA, stated: “In 2025, we continue building on MOCA’s incredible legacy of presenting exhibitions that speak directly to the present moment while drawing from history in deeply resonant ways. This season’s exhibitions encourage our audiences to connect with new ideas, reflect on art’s role in shaping place, and explore how contemporary art can illuminate the complexities of our world. MOCA is proud to create a platform for artists who engage in and inspire critical thought, dialogue, and imagination.”

Clara Kim, MOCA’s Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, adds: “Our 2025 exhibitions demonstrate the extraordinary range of expressions in contemporary art—from large-scale explorations of artists’ personal and social worlds to groundbreaking solo projects and historical reexaminations. Whether addressing the construction of history, personal mythologies, or the politics of representation, these exhibitions challenge and inspire us to rethink and re-imagine our relationship to time, place, and culture.” 

MOCA concludes its presentation of Josh Kline: Climate Change on January 5, 2025 at MOCA Grand Avenue. The critically acclaimed exhibition offers an immersive suite of science-fiction installations that imagine a future sculpted by a ruinous climate crisis and the ordinary people destined to inhabit it. Through May 4, 2025, MOCA presents Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, a landmark exhibition reexamining the postwar art movement of photorealism and tracing its lineages among a new generation of artists today; and MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia, the first U.S. solo presentation of the artist’s work, featuring a new work commissioned for the exhibition plus two recent bodies of work at MOCA Grand Avenue. Olafur Eliasson: OPEN, the ambitious site-specific installation by the celebrated Icelandic-Danish artist, presented as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, remains on view through July 6, 2025 at MOCA Geffen. 

Through its 2025 exhibition program, MOCA invites critical reflection, meaningful dialogue, and deeper connections with contemporary art and its impact within culture and society.

2025 schedule of upcoming exhibitions

Wael Shawky, Drama 1882
February 20–March 16, 2025
WAREHOUSE at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

MOCA presents the U.S. premiere of Wael Shawky’s (b. 1971 Alexandria, Egypt) widely celebrated film installation Drama 1882. Debuted at the Egyptian Pavilion of the 2024 Venice Biennale, this riveting, moving image work takes the form of an eight-part opera, performed for the camera and filmed in a historic theater in Alexandria. Drama 1882 takes the populist Urabi revolution in Egypt against British imperialism (1879-1882) as its foundation, specifically a cafe brawl between a local donkey owner and a Maltese man that unleashed events that precipitated over seventy years of British colonial rule in Egypt. Seamlessly integrating fact, speculation, and fiction, Shawky proposes alternatives to established records. Sung entirely in classical Arabic by professional performers with sensational costumes and against the backdrop of colorful, expressionist sets, Drama 1882 is a spectacular restaging of historical events and further explores Shawky’s interest in historical counter-narratives, ultimately emphasizing the futility of war while probing the implications of drama itself. According to Shawky, the work “conjures a sense of entertainment, of catastrophe, and our inherent doubt in history.”

Drama 1882 is presented at MOCA as part of Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs and is organized by Alex Sloane, Associate Curator with Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs.

Diary of Flowers: Artists and their Worlds
March 2, 2025–January 4, 2026
MOCA Grand Avenue

Diary of Flowers: Artists and their Worlds brings together over 80 artworks from MOCA’s renowned collection, demonstrating how artists create their own worlds through their art–building networks, circles, and mythologies. Embracing the boundaries between the personal and the social, public and private lives, as well as emotional and psychological states, works in the show privilege sites of creativity and the place of the imagination to conjure new worlds and possibilities. Friendship, love, and intimacy become important starting points for artistic expression. The exhibition features work in all media across different geographies, cultures, and periods, by artists including Belkis Ayón, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mona Hatoum, Candice Lin, Annette Messeger, Wangechi Mutu, Lucas Samaras, Mohammed Sami, Tunga, and Haegue Yang, as well as a gallery dedicated to Nan Goldin.

Diary of Flowers: Artists and their Worlds is organized by Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Paula Kroll, Curatorial Assistant, and Ariana Rizo, Curatorial Assistant.

Tracing Performance, Fictions of Display
June 29, 2025–March 15, 2026
MOCA Grand Avenue

This exhibition highlights works from the MOCA permanent collection that engage with the not always obvious relationship between objects, theater, and performance. Tracing Performance, Fictions of Display builds upon Claes Oldenburg’s The Store (1961–62), a performative project that staged the commercial transaction of selling an artwork in a bodega-like environment, as well as other economies determined by gestures, transactions, and bodies in works by Colette (or her alter ego Justine), Rebecca Horn, Brian Jurgen, Mike Kelley, Terence Koh, Beverly Semmes, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Martine Syms, among others. Several works on view have never been exhibited at MOCA before, including the painting Monsieur On Sait Qui (1982), by influential Polish theater director and happening artist Tadeusz Kantor; the five-channel video installation Big Hunt (2002) by Catherine Sullivan, who was trained as an actor as well as visual artist, and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s photograph The Loneliness of the Immigrant (1979–2011).

The exhibition will also present recent acquisitions, including Silke Otto-Knapp’s painting Shattentheater (Chalk circles) [Theater of Shadows (Chalk circles)] (2017), a five-panel work based on photographs of the Bauhaus Dessau theater facility designed by Walter Gropius in 1926. 

Tracing Performance, Fictions of Display is organized by José Luis Blondet, Senior Curator, with Paula Kroll, Curatorial Assistant.

MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi
June 29, 2025–March 15, 2026
MOCA Grand Avenue

MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi is the third exhibition in the recently relaunched MOCA Focus series, which presents an artist’s first solo museum show in Los Angeles and centers on new or discrete bodies of work. Born in Okayama, Japan, in 1952, Yamaguchi moved to the U.S. in the early 1970s and began to appropriate imagery from sources as diverse as Mexican muralism, Renaissance art, Japanese Nihonga, and Art Nouveau in ornate paintings that pose a challenge to rigid notions of ethnic identity and cultural ownership. At age seventy-two, the Los Angeles–based artist is synthesizing the motifs she has developed over the past forty years in a series of archly stylized oil-and-bronze-leaf seascapes featured in this exhibition. Yamaguchi’s precise yet luscious paintings incorporate her “Eastern” and “Western”-influenced vocabulary of abstract zigzags, spirals, and braids to denote natural forms like rain, waves, and mountains, representing a culmination of her decades-long provocations of style, taste, and identity.

MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi is accompanied by a Nimoy Emerging Artist Publication Series catalogue, marking the artist’s first monograph. The exhibition is organized by Anna Katz, Senior Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant.

MONUMENTS
October 23, 2025–May 24, 2026
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

October 23, 2025–April 2026
The Brick

Co-organized and co-presented by MOCA and The Brick, MONUMENTS marks the recent wave of monument removals as a historic moment. The exhibition reflects on the histories and legacies of post-Civil War America as they continue to resonate today. It brings together a selection of decommissioned Confederate statues with contemporary artworks borrowed and commissioned for the occasion. 

Removed from their original outdoor public context and installed within the galleries of MOCA and The Brick, the decommissioned Confederate statues featured in MONUMENTS will be shown in their varying conditions, from unscathed to heavily vandalized. The selection of monuments comes from a group of nearly 200 that have been taken down in recent years (many more currently remain standing).

These monuments are juxtaposed with artworks by emerging and established figures in contemporary art, including: Bethany Collins, Karon Davis, Abigail DeVille, Stan Douglas, Leonardo Drew, Torkwase Dyson, Kevin Jerome Everson, Nona Faustine, Jon Henry, Kahlil Robert Irving, Monument Lab, Walter Price, Martin Puryear, Andres Serrano, Hank Willis Thomas, Davóne Tines, and Kara Walker.

The decommissioned monuments in the exhibition illustrate the evolution of the Confederate monument from its roots in a funerary impulse to its rise as a crystalline symbol of a white supremacist ideology, whose obstinacy became increasingly conspicuous against calls for civil rights. They are borrowed from private lenders and institutions such as the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center and the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, as well municipalities including the cities of Baltimore, Boston, Montgomery, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh.

MONUMENTS will be accompanied by a scholarly publication and a robust slate of public and educational programming.

MONUMENTS is co-organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Brick, Los Angeles, based on an exhibition concept by The Brick Director Hamza Walker. The exhibition is co-curated by Hamza Walker, artist Kara Walker, and Bennett Simpson, MOCA Senior Curator, with Hannah Burstein, The Brick Project Manager, and Paula Kroll, MOCA Curatorial Assistant.
 

More information: T 213 626 6222 or visit moca.org

Media contact: Danielle Bias, Chief Communications Officer, communications@moca.org