Downtown Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Expands

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego celebrated the grand opening of the new Joan & Irwin Jacobs Building and the David C. Copley Building at its downtown location on January 20, 2007. These new spaces are located across the street from the original downtown location on Kettner and offers 16,000 sq. ft of additional exhibition space and a new lecture hall and education room.

Richard-Gluckman designed the project, which included renovating the 1915 Santa Fe Depot baggage building (The Jacobs Building) and the construction of a new three-story building (the Copley Building).

The architects were very respectful of the original Spanish Mission-Colonial Revival style of the baggage building in designing the Jacobs Building, preserving the exterior while maximizing the interior space to allow for the exhibition of large-scale or site-specific work. Offering four gallery spaces and the Robert Caplan Artist-in-Residence Studio.

Visitors enter the Jacobs Building at the Pfister Entrance, where the first thing noticed is the smell of chai tea and spices. After paying the admission fee ($10 or less, allowing visits to the museum's galleries on both sides of Kettner and the original museum and sculpture garden in La Jolla) stroll into the Iris and Matthew Strauss Gallery where the sculpture by Richard Serra, the San Diego trolleys, trains and beautiful bay are visible through a wall of glass doors.

As the smell of tea grows stronger, step into the largest gallery, the Peter C. Farrell Gallery, where Enesto Neto of Brazil has installed a temporary work of art titled Untitled (commission for Jacobs Building). Neto created a sculpture made from hundreds of yards of Lycra, filled with spices like tumeric, clove, cumin, ginger, anato and pepper, that look like polyps all suspended from the ceiling, filling the massive space.

In the Pauline and Stanley Foster Gallery, which is dedicated to video and other new media, the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila is exhibiting The Hour of Prayer, 2005, her asynchronous four-channel DVD story of her dog, Luca's death. Ahtila narrates the story, which takes you from New York City, to Finland and West Africa using all four screens to visually carry you along the journey.

Works by Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and others are part of the "Modern American Masters" exhibition, in the Melinda Farris Wortz Gallery, and are protected from potential damage in the climate-controlled environment.

The David C. Copley Building includes a textual and light-emitting diode (LED) installation, by Jenny Holzer, titled For MCASD. Words in Spanish and English scroll vertically and float in the air along the side of the building. This building wrapped in corrugated metal, includes a 120-seat auditorium for lectures, programs, and films and an education room for hands-on activities. A boardroom along with curatorial and administrative offices are on the third floor.