Department of Art History

A MOMENTOUS MOMENT IN TIME OF PASSAGE AND LANDING, 2024

Dave Young Kim (b. 1979) Acrylic Paint
Funding provided by Margaret Leong Checca

This mural celebrates the journeys that diasporic communities have undertaken when leaving their homelands to find new places to nest. Muralist Dave Young Kim’s A Momentous Moment in Time of Passage and Landing imagines over 30 birds traveling together in harmonious flight. Each bird pictured here is an official national bird from Asia and the Pacific Islands, representing the diverse communities who now call Southern California home.

Kim explains that the message in a flock of birds moving together towards a common goal—seeking a new home, settling in, and finding resources for survival—is universally felt. Through this common experience and undeniable history, we are connected. These shared experiences are the basis of the human condition.

Kim’s vision aligns seamlessly with the USC Pacific Asia Museum’s core mission to promote intercultural understanding in the service of elevating our shared sense of humanity. Through the amplification of local voices and narratives, this mural serves as a poignant testament to the diverse cultural legacies within the local AAPI community and affirms the museum’s steadfast commitment to them.

The museum is closed Monday and Tuesdays.
Hours 11:00 am – 5:00 pm

Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden
June 26, 2026 – January 3, 2027

Since the 1960s, artist Raymond Saunders (1934–2025) has developed a painting practice rooted in improvisation. Working across mediums, he combines everyday objects, found imagery, drawing, notational markings, and text in constellated compositions that blend abstraction and figuration against the complex backdrop of American history.

The museum is closed Monday and Tuesdays.
Hours 11:00 am – 6:00 pm

Dear Little Friend: Impressions of Galka Scheyer

February 20, 2026 – July 20, 2026

The German-born art dealer Galka Scheyer played a pivotal role in bringing European modernism to the United States. This focus exhibition looks at her legacy through the personal relationships she forged with both artists and supporters. Featuring portraits and ephemera, Dear Little Friend illuminates Scheyer’s mission to promote the Blue Four: Alexei Jawlensky, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky.

Highlights include works from Scheyer’s collection, featuring such artists as Maynard Dixon, Peter Krasnow, Beatrice Wood and Edward Weston. The exhibition also shows gifts she received from the Blue Four artists. The title, which refers to an affectionate salutation Feininger adopted in his letters to Scheyer, encapsulates the personal relationships and collaborative spirit that defined her enterprise in Europe and California.

The museum is closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Hours 12:00 am – 5:00 pm

How to Be a Guerrilla Girl
Nov 18, 2025–Apr 12, 2026
Research Institute Galleries

How to Be a Guerrilla Girl presents the inner workings of the anonymous feminist art collective alongside a new commission at the Getty Research Institute. Drawing on the Guerrilla Girls’ archive, the exhibition explores the steps the group took to create their eye-catching and humorous public interventions. The exhibition places the Guerrilla Girls’ well-known posters in the broader context of their data research, protest actions, culture jamming, and distribution methods. Coinciding with the Guerrilla Girls’ 40th anniversary, the exhibition tells the story of their collaborative process and longstanding commitment to call for equity for women and artists of color in the art world.

Getty Center
Museum East Pavilion, Upper Level

All exhibitions are included in your free, timed-entry reservation to Getty. Reservations are available six weeks in advance. Please note, there is a fee for parking.

Haegue Yang: Star-Crossed Rendezvous
March 1, 2025 – August 2, 2026

A unique collaboration between MOCA and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, this presentation brings together the work of internationally acclaimed visual artist Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul) and her interest in and engagement with the late composer Isang Yun (1917-1995).

The institutional collaboration unfolds over two distinct presentations: an exhibition featuring a sprawling installation Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun, 2024, at MOCA Grand Avenue, for its U.S. debut; and a concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall for a special one evening performance of Yun’s Double Concerto, 1977, by the LA Philharmonic on March 10, 2026. This project bridges two distinguished cultural organizations and their unique architectural sites, connecting them through time and space, with this immersive sonic and visual experience.

Prior to this special joint presentation, Yang and MOCA will organize a day-long symposium Star-Crossed Rendezvous: The Musical Legacy of Isang Yun, gathering leading musicologists, composers and historians on November 22, 2025 at the Ahmanson Auditorium in MOCA Grand Avenue.

Haegue Yang: Star-Crossed Rendezvous is organized by Paula Kroll, Assistant Curator, with Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Lead support is provided by the MOCA Global Council and Ministry of Culture, Sports & Tourism of Korea, Korea Arts Management Service, and Korea Focus Support Program.

Tuesday and Sunday, 11am–5pm.
All visitors should reserve an online ticket.

Grounded
Sep 14, 2025–Jun 21, 2026
BCAM, Level 2

Grounded invites visitors to see land not just as terrain, but as a foundation for exploring ecology, sovereignty, memory, and home. Featuring 35 artists based in the Americas and the Pacific, the exhibition showcases 40 works, spanning the 1970s to today, with many on view for the first time. Works include Lisa Reihana’s monumental video installation In Pursuit of Venus [infected] that reimagines colonial narratives from her perspective as a Māori artist; photographs and video by Clarissa Tossin, Laura Aguilar, and Ana Mendieta that trace the artists’ bodies in dialogue with the earth; paintings and sculptures by Eamon Ore Girón, Courtney M. Leonard, and Rose B. Simpson that blend technology with Indigenous iconography and craft; and works by Leslie Martinez and Abraham Cruzvillegas that upcycle everyday materials to document consumption and to suggest possibilities for renewal.

Museum is closed on Wednesdays

Ken Gonzales- Day: History’s “Nevermade
August 19, 2025 – March 14, 2026

Exploring cultural memory through his photographs, drawings, and paintings as well as through research and scholarship, artist, teacher, and scholar Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964) has contributed profound insights over his 30-year career to the understanding of race and place in the United States. This survey exhibition seeks to put the major series of photographic works, film/video, drawings, and paintings in context, showing the deep political and theoretical concerns through which Gonzales-Day animates the range of works and pointing to larger American political issues in relation to which each series can be understood.

Sadie Barnette: How to Fly
September 30, 2025 – October 3, 2027

How to Fly is a site-specific photomural by visual artist Sadie Barnette installed in CAAM’s atrium. Born and raised in Oakland, California, Barnette incorporates photographs she has taken of locations across the state with pictures from her family archives. The installation includes references to Barnette’s past artworks, as well as her signature motifs, such as glitter, rhinestones, cars, and plant life. The collection of images, ranging from a cousin’s birthday cake to a well-worn copy of Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz, are set at varying scales against an ombre rainbow backdrop, adding to the surfeit of color and pattern. Barnette has described herself as a “keeper of the past,” someone whose role it is to tend to the historical archive, including its moments big and small. While the photomural serves to chronicle and monumentalize her story and family history with a sense of humor and play, it is also an invitation for viewers to see themselves, their loved ones, and the magic of the everyday in their own lives.

Museum is closed on Mondays

The eight directions of the wind: Edmund de Waal at The Huntington
October 18, 2025 October 26, 2026

The Huntington presents the evocative works of acclaimed British artist and author Edmund de Waal in “the eight directions of the wind: Edmund de Waal at The Huntington.” This yearlong exhibition features de Waal’s site-specific installations at three iconic Huntington sites: the Huntington Art Gallery, the Chinese Garden, and the Japanese Garden.

Huntington Art Gallery, Chinese Garden, and Japanese Garden

Robert Therrien: This is a Story
November 22, 2025–April 5, 2026

“Tables you could walk under, stacks of dishes as tall as columns, chairs that, seen from below, resemble towers. . . the artist behind that wonderland is Robert Therrien.” —Giorgia Aprosio, Domus

Opening November 22, Robert Therrien: This is a Story invites visitors to walk beneath oversized tables and chairs, encounter enormous hanging beards, and navigate stacked dishes that seem to shift before your eyes. Featuring over 120 works, many never before shown in a museum, this special exhibition offers a rare opportunity to engage with Therrien’s playful explorations of memory, perception, and transformation.

Closed Mondays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas

The Ireichō: Book of Names
Touring the United States 2025

Japanese American National Museum (JANM) is honored to partner with The Irei Project and USC’s Duncan Ryuken Williams to travel The Ireichō: Book of Names in conjunction with pilgrimages to all ten former War Relocation Authority (WRA) concentration camps, to other Department of Justice (DOJ) and Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) incarceration sites, and selected cities across the US. The national tour launched in Washington, DC, in February at Day of Remembrance events at the US Navy Memorial and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American HIstory.

The Ireichō is the first comprehensive listing of persons of Japanese ancestry who were incarcerated in US Army, DOJ, WCCA, and WRA camps. The tour will help fulfill the vision of the Museum and The Irei Project to honor and recognize all 125,284 individuals in the Ireichō and provide an opportunity for thousands of more people across the US to engage in this powerful and intimate act of racial repair and healing.

The tour is also part of JANM on the Go, a series of programs and exhibitions presented across California, the US, and beyond during the renovation of the Museum’s Pavilion in 2025 and 2026. At the close of the national tour in August 2026, the Ireichō will be formally gifted by the Irei Project to JANM, where it will remain as part of JANM’s permanent collection and a lasting monument to the formidable strength of the Japanese American community.