MOCA’s Grand Avenue dungeon

In the ongoing flurry of news articles and opinion pieces in The Times about the future of Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, nobody seems willing to admit that the location MOCA is closing for at least six months -- the Geffen Contemporary near Little Tokyo -- is the wrong one.

In my 25 years as president of the California Community Foundation, I was privileged to visit scores of art museums in every major city in the United States -- and not just the usual suspects in places such as New York and San Francisco, but in Tacoma, Fort Worth, Miami, Richmond and Oklahoma City, among many others. The only art museum I visited at which I had to descend to enter -- the only one -- was MOCA. You descend into subways and sewers, but you should never have to do so at art museums -- or anything festive for that matter. The long-defunct Triforium food court in downtown Los Angeles learned that the hard way. Going down into that place was so depressing there should have been a sign on the entrance: “Abandon hope, all ye who nosh here.”

The Geffen Contemporary, which used to be known as the Temporary Contemporary (a very cool name), was the original site of MOCA and promised a quirky, slightly unfinished adventure that made visiting the museum fun. The Stygian descent into the Grand Avenue location promises nothing of the sort.

Intuitively sensing its depressing entrance, MOCA added something whimsical up top: Claes Oldenburg’s giant pocketknife sculpture and a sassy gift shop. But all the whimsy and sass are snatched away when you make your way down into that windowless cavern to enter the museum. The first thing you hit after descending the stairs is the inevitable swirl of dust, leaves and litter that is part of the design vortex of the entrance courtyard. The entrance was softened a bit when the sandwich shop opened, but people eventually got the willies, not to mention gritty baguettes, in what looked to all the world like an abandoned hand-ball court.

Did anybody really want to put MOCA in that Grand Avenue basement? But what the heck: It was free, and maybe the parking could sort itself out later. One has to wonder, was the Grand Avenue site chosen because it would be good for MOCA? Or was it chosen because MOCA was thought to be good for what would become the Grand Avenue project?

MOCA has a fantastic contemporary art collection that will only get better, much better, over time. And MOCA deserves to be saved. But it deserves far better than the Grand Avenue site. Reopen the Geffen Contemporary and fix it up. Make it fun to go to MOCA again, and sell that Grand Avenue location to somebody who doesn’t mind living and working in a dungeon.

Jack Shakely was president of the California Community Foundation from 1980 to 2004.