There seems to be no recession in the LA art community as Eli Broad leads the charge to launch the new MoCA where his money will provide a matching grant to other donor’s efforts. This November, the museum is planning a 30th anniversary gala re-launch, according to Mike Boehm of LA’s Culture Monster:
Broad said the gala will be reminiscent of the one that launched Disney Hall in 2003, with a big party tent set up on a closed-off Grand Avenue, and tables-for-10 inside going for up to $100,000 each. “We already have a number of $100,000 commitments,” Broad said, predicting that the celebration would draw as many as 800 guests, enabling MOCA to reap a “seven-figure” fundraising return after expenses.[…]
To spread the word about the gala and MOCA’s comeback from the brink, a team of benefactors and top staffers hopped between the season’s two big events on the contemporary art scene, the Venice Biennale exhibition in Italy, and the Art Basel fair in Switzerland. With “MOCA New” co-chairs Eli Broad and Maria Bell and their spouses as hosts, it was lunch for 100 invited guests in Venice on June 3. Then the Broads sprung for dinner for 50 on Monday in Basel.
Reached in Basel on Wednesday, Broad said the thrust of the gatherings, and of separate briefings for art writers, was to repaint the MOCA picture, replacing the gloomy headlines of six and seven months ago. “Our pitch was very simple: `This is MOCA New,'” he said, with fiscal stability restored and all efforts pointing toward the November bash, in which a sweeping exhibition of 500 artworks will celebrate both the museum’s past and its renewed prospects.
“It will be an amazing turnaround in one year,” said Broad, whose bailout offer to MOCA totals $30 million — $15 million over five years to help fund exhibitions, and $15 million more to help rebuild the endowment that museum leaders nearly depleted during years of dipping into savings to pay operating expenses. Broad’s endowment pledge will be paid gradually, in a dollar-for-dollar match of money MOCA is expected to raise from other sources.
MoCA Promotes Gala, Courts Donors in Europe (Culture Monster)