Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla branch in 2008
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| Former name | The Art Center in La Jolla, La Jolla Art Museum, La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art |
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| Established | 1941 |
| Location | San Diego, California, US |
| Coordinates | 32°50′40″N 117°16′41″W / 32.84444°N 117.27806°WCoordinates: 32°50′40″N 117°16′41″W / 32.84444°N 117.27806°W |
| Type | Art Museum |
| Website | mcasd.org |
The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (or MCASD), in San Diego, California, US, is an art museum focused on the collection, preservation, exhibition, and interpretation of works of art from 1950 to the present.
Founded in 1941 in La Jolla as The Art Center in La Jolla, a community art center, through the 1950s and 1960s the organization operated as the La Jolla Art Museum. The museum was originally the 1915 residence of newspaper heiress and philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps, designed by the noted architect Irving Gill.
In the early 1970s, the name changed to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, focusing the purview on the period from 1950 to the present. In 1990, the Museum changed its name to San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, only to change it to Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, after confusion developed between its name and the San Diego Museum of Art. The new name also acknowledged the larger geographic context and the population base of nearly 3 million in San Diego County, and opened a $1.2-million satellite facility downtown in 1993, further embracing the region.
In 1996, a major $9.2 million renovation and expansion of MCASD La Jolla took place, designed by Robert Venturi of the firm Venturi Scott Brown & Associates. Venturi's 30,000 square feet (2,800 square metres) addition included four more galleries, doubling the museum's exhibition space to 10,000 square feet (930 square metres). It also expanded the museum's educational space, storage space, bookstore library and restaurant. It transformed the garden into an outdoor exhibition space for sculpture.
In 2007, a $25-million downtown location of the Museum was opened, designed by architect Richard Gluckman of Gluckman Mayner Architects, New York. The expansion added 30,000 square feet (2,800 square metres) of space to the downtown site and increases its exhibition space from about 6,000 square feet (560 square metres) to 16,500 square feet (1,530 square metres). At the north end of the building is a three-story structure of corrugated steel and textured glass. It houses curatorial offices, art-handling and storage facilities, an art education classroom, a lecture hall that opens onto a terrace and a boardroom with a view of the harbor. The renovated baggage building is named for Irwin M. Jacobs, founder of the technology company Qualcomm, and his wife, Joan. The three-story Modernist structure bears the name of philanthropist and newspaper publisher David C. Copley.
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