The museum's founding committee moved quickly. In the early years, before a permanent building existed, MOCA operated in a temporary space in Little Tokyo that became known as the Temporary Contemporary — and then, because audiences loved it too much to lose, eventually as the Geffen Contemporary, a permanent satellite location that the museum had never planned to keep.

For the permanent Grand Avenue building, MOCA chose Arata Isozaki, a celebrated Japanese architect who had never before worked on a project in the United States. His 1986 building announced itself with deliberate restraint: the main exhibition spaces descend below the level of the courtyard, lit from above by a series of pyramidal skylights. The exterior is faced in sandstone, warm and solid against the glass towers of downtown. When it opened, it was received as a dramatic achievement — a building that did not shout but commanded.

The collection that filled it was equally ambitious. Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, an Italian collector whose holdings in minimalist, post-minimalist, and neo-expressionist work were among the most significant in the world, donated a portion of his collection to MOCA — a gift that instantly gave the young institution depth and seriousness.

MOCA's focus on work created after 1940 is not an arbitrary curatorial choice. It is a bet about where the significant cultural production of the 20th and 21st centuries has happened — in the aftermath of World War II, in the movements that broke with tradition and asked what art could be when all previous certainties had been destroyed.

The permanent collection holds nearly 5,000 works: abstract expressionism, pop art, minimalism, conceptual art, performance documentation, video, installation. The artists include Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, Cindy Sherman and Richard Serra, artists who transformed what a viewer could expect to encounter in a museum.

The Geffen Contemporary, the warehouse space in Little Tokyo that was supposed to be temporary, has a different character than the Grand Avenue building — industrial, vast, undecorated. It is particularly suited to large-scale installations, to art that needs space to breathe and declare itself. The two buildings serve different purposes and attract different kinds of work.

MOCA has navigated significant institutional crises since its founding. A financial emergency in the late 2000s brought the museum to the edge of merger or closure, and resulted in a major restructuring and new philanthropic commitments that stabilized its finances. Questions about gender equity in programming — the museum's historical underrepresentation of female artists in solo exhibitions — prompted public debate and internal reform.

Through these crises, the institution's core purpose has remained constant: to be the place in Los Angeles where contemporary art is taken seriously, where the most challenging and important work of the present finds a home. That purpose has made MOCA indispensable to the city's cultural life, even when the institution has struggled to live up to its own ambitions.

Grand Avenue has changed around the museum since 1986. The Walt Disney Concert Hall rose next door. New towers appeared. The Broad museum opened across the street in 2015. The neighborhood that MOCA helped imagine has arrived — a dense cultural district in the heart of downtown, something Los Angeles had always wanted and had always been told was impossible.