Moments from Museum of Contemporary Art

Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1979, split its collection early on between two very different buildings: the Arata Isozaki-designed main building on Grand Avenue downtown, opened in 1986 with its distinctive red sandstone geometry and partially sunken galleries, and the Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo, a converted police garage and hardware warehouse that was meant as a temporary home while the main building was under construction but proved so well suited to housing oversized contemporary work that MOCA simply kept using it permanently.

The two spaces genuinely suit different kinds of art, so check which building is showing what before you go, the Geffen's raw industrial scale handles large installation and sculpture that the more conventionally proportioned Grand Avenue galleries can't accommodate. MOCA has built its reputation specifically on postwar and contemporary American and international art, Rothko, Rauschenberg, and generations of LA-based artists among them, treating the city's own art scene as central to its identity rather than incidental to it.