It’s far too soon to say, but MOCA today is a more hopeful place than it’s been in a while. I was drawn to some surprises in its permanent collection, like a cloth work from 1977 by the South Korean conceptualist Kim Yong-ik, donated in 2017, before Mr. Biesenbach’s arrival. A scalding new addition by Cameron Rowland, one of New York’s smartest young artists, amends MOCA’s donor recognition wall to reflect how the museum’s site on Grand Avenue, formerly a melting pot of Latino and Asian families, was razed and redeveloped.
Elsewhere, MOCA has wisely closed its western satellite at the Pacific Design Center, and Mr. Biesenbach is trying to balance programming between the Grand Avenue headquarters and the more flexible Geffen Contemporary, in Little Tokyo. The museum lacks a chief curator in the mold of Paul Schimmel, its longtime figurehead, but MOCA has got a sharp, diverse college of young curators, including Lanka Tattersall, Bryan Barcena and Amanda Hunt (who is also a curator of the nimble, if perhaps too Instagram-optimized, Desert X biennial in Palm Springs, through April 21).
Artists on the Move
Mr. Biesenbach took some serious stick in his first days in the job for describing his new home in The New York Times as “turning into the new Berlin” on account of its influx of artists and supposedly cheap real estate — a shock to those facing rent hikes far in excess of inflation and living among an intense homelessness crisis. Forbes magazine, last year, called Los Angeles the worst city in America to rent a home; studio space isn’t cheap either.
Matters aren’t helped by the debt load young artists take on at the city’s fabled art schools; both the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, and ArtCenter College of Design, in Pasadena, rank among the 10 most expensive degrees in the country. (Free advice to young artists contemplating an M.F.A.: try Brussels, where tuition is a few thousand dollars a year.)
But young painters and sculptors and photographers have been chasing their dreams out here since “The Day of the Locust,” and the city’s scrappier galleries and artist-run nonprofits have a freer spirit than you usually find in New York or London. Some of the most intriguing work I saw came from the young local artist David Alekhuogie, whose lush, flower-festooned photographs of young black men in sagging jeans shiver with both political ire and sexual potency.
Mr. Alekhuogie, though born in Los Angeles, trained at the venerable Yale photography department — and decided to make his career back West. Received wisdom is that the city’s art schools are its initial draw and its social nuclei. But I kept noticing how many young artists, notably artists of color, came out here or returned home after finishing East Coast art educations, including fellow Yalies like the painters Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Christina Quarles and the installation artist Lauren Halsey.
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