MOCA board member, ad-man Cliff Einstein, who then worked out of a PDC office, pushed for the partnership and Cohen offered the space rent free. Jeremy Strick, the MOCA director who would resign seven years later amidst financial scandal, had just taken the helm, and agreed to take over the Murray Feldman Gallery at the PDC, named after the complex’s first director and home to various design-related shows over the years (Christie’s held auctions there). Inside, work by 19 Japanese artists, designers, and animators colorfully highlighted flatness in Japan’s visual culture. MOCA PDC officially opened in 2001 with Takashi Murakami’s Superflat exhibition - banners stretched across the building’s exterior featured Murakami’s now ubiquitous floating cartoon eyes. Whatever the reason, MOCA PDC deserves parting attention, largely because its evolutions, successes, and sometimes confounding programming often reflected city-wide cultural identity crises. (The program “reached its natural conclusion,” said Peterson.) Maybe newly appointed MOCA director Klaus Biesenbach nixed the PDC building, or maybe closure plans predated his arrival. ![]() ![]() The PDC also recently ended its DesignLAB program, which brought a handful of galleries to the building’s second floor at a time when the economic downturn left it full of vacancies. Maybe the agenda of Charles Cohen, who is no longer on MOCA’s board, changed. But the press release issued in January said the “agreement between the two organizations has reached the end of its term.” When I reached out to MOCA’s communications director, Sarah Stifler, she said she could not comment further on the closure, citing legal reasons, and Karen Peterson, a spokesperson for Cohen and the PDC, said “we do not yet have comment” on “what will go into the MOCA building” in the future. ![]() The agreement Cohen and the museum renewed back in 2008 specified that MOCA would continue programming the space through 2023. In January, MOCA and Charles Cohen, the developer who bought the PDC in 1999, announced that the satellite would shutter after nearly two decades in operation. It also hosted some exceptional exhibitions over its 19-year run. Its final show, of Kahlil Joseph’s striking, immersive film Fly Paper, ended February 24, and, midway through last week, a hand-drawn, blue-marker sign taped to the museum’s door read “CLOSED.” An awkward, two-floored gallery on a street with easy-to-find weekday parking, it offered free admission, unlike the downtown spaces. MOCA PDC never acquired a defined identity, but it was endearing and accessible as an art space. New, soon-to-be-embattled MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch had green-lit Franco’s art-for-TV performance, and perhaps Deitch’s critics, already frustrated by the director’s affinity for celebrity culture, sighed with relief when they learned the soap opera was filming not at either of the better-known downtown locations but at this evasive outpost. Franco was playing an artist in an episode of the soap opera General Hospital, while simultaneously trying his hand at performance art right outside MOCA’s smallest location: MOCA PDC, a mausoleum-like, stand-alone, cast concrete gallery nestled in the shadow of the three massive, shimmering Red, Green, and Blue Buildings that starchitect Pelli envisioned as a design complex, known as the Pacific Design Center (PDC), back in the 1970s. LOS ANGELES - One summer night in 2010, actor James Franco jumped from a ledge of the monstrous Cesar Pelli-designed mall in West Hollywood in front of cameras, bewildered bystanders, and the staff of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. ![]() Installation view of One Day at a Time: Kahlil Joseph’s Fly Paper, November 17, 2018–Februat MOCA Pacific Design Center (PDC) (image courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, photo by Zak Kelle)
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