It’s more than just a bake sale.
Some 3,200 MOCA-philes have signed a petition against the proposed merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The petition has been delivered by the grassroots group, MOCA Mobilization, to MOCA’s board. This is the same group that held a rally at the museum’s Geffen Contemporary building on Nov. 23, which was attended by prominent LA artists, as well as Paul Schimmel, MOCA’s chief curator.
The museum’s board meets again later today to ponder possible solutions to the institution’s crisis of cash flow and confidence.
Here is the statement delivered to the board by MOCA Mobilization:
We support an independent and autonomous MOCA. We condemn any plan now or in
the future to merge MOCA with any other institution. MOCA’s artistic integrity and
vitality, acknowledged locally and globally, can only be served by its existence as an
independent museum, and not as a department or program at LACMA, whose mission as
an encyclopedic museum must appropriately frame its numerous programs.LACMA’s press release of Dec. 16 states: “The goal of this plan would be to
preserve the independence and integrity of both institutions while combining their
operations and infrastructure.” This is not a definition of “independence” that we accept.We at MOCA Mobilization want the reality of independence—not the appearance of it.
We demand that the MOCA Board of Trustees honor MOCA’s local and international
leadership in contemporary art by maintaining the museum’s autonomy.