LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), continues to highlight its outstanding permanent collection with a new exhibition at its MOCA Grand Avenue location. Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions, focusing on works added to the collection during the past five years, will be on view July 12 to October 19, 2009. The show joins A Changing Ratio: Painting and Sculpture from the Collection, which opened at MOCA Grand Avenue on March 1 and has been extended to September 28, 2009.

COLLECTING HISTORY: HIGHLIGHTING RECENT ACQUISITIONS
Inspired by the remarkable growth of the museum’s holdings through gifts and purchases over the past decade, Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions surveys recent acquisitions to MOCA’s world-renowned permanent collection, with a particular focus on the last five years. While many of the works on view are being exhibited by the museum for the first time, the selection also features works by artists included in the acclaimed MOCA exhibitions A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968 (2004), Poetics of the Handmade (2007), and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), as well as the museum’s MOCA Focus series. Collecting History is organized by MOCA Senior Curator Ann Goldstein and MOCA Associate Curator Bennett Simpson.

MOCA’s recent collecting is notable for its breadth and range. Collecting History assembles significant works by historical, mid-career, and emerging artists working locally, nationally, and internationally, including Eduardo Abaroa, John Altoon, Jennifer Bornstein, Stanley Brouwn, Tony Conrad, Hanne Darboven, Roe Ethridge, VALIE EXPORT, Öyvind Fahlström, Hans Haacke, Rachel Harrison, Robert Huot, Mike Kelley, Jutta Koether, Suzanne Lacy, Lisa Lapinski, Allan McCollum, Matt Mullican, Gary Simmons, Cosima von Bonin, Marnie Weber, Ai Weiwei, William Wegman, and Lawrence Weiner, among many others. The exhibition draws from works acquired through purchases and gifts, including significant donations from Michael Asher, Blake Byrne, Mandy and Cliff Einstein, Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard, Mike Kelley, Alan Power, and The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, among many other donors.