Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) La Jolla will close, likely for a couple of years, in January 2017 for an addition/retrofit quadrupling its current gallery space from 10,000 to about 40,000 square feet.
“La Jolla is our flagship, and now we’ll have room to house our permanent collection of more than 4,700 art objects,” said Kathryn Kanjo, the museum’s deputy director of arts and programming and soon-to-be David C. Copley director/CEO. “This is really to create a building that matches the caliber of our collections, so people can return time and again and have this art history lesson unfold for them.”
Annabelle Selldorf of New York-based Selldorf Architects, has been engaged to lead the museum reconstruction project.
Kanjo said the revamped museum will have enough space to have changing special exhibits, as well as a new art park in the current parking lot, and two new outdoor terraces to take advantage of the exquisite ocean views.
Composed of both its oceanfront La Jolla campus and three downtown buildings on Kettner Boulevard, MCASD campuses have hosted several contemporary art exhibitions a year, plus other public events and educational programming.
The La Jolla building also houses the Sherwood Auditorium, a performing arts venue used by the museum and outside arts groups like the La Jolla Music Society, which has a new music venue, The Conrad, under construction on Fay Avenue. Sherwood will disappear with the refit, giving way to exhibition space.
“As we ready ourselves for construction, we will close the La Jolla facility in January 2017 and consolidate our programming to the Copley and Jacobs Buildings at the downtown location,” said Leah Straub, MCASD’s communications and marketing manager. “When the closure occurs in January, we will reduce staffing levels by eight of our 44 full-time positions, and 20 of our 45 part-time positions. A few months ago we communicated this message to employees whose positions will be affected.”
What the expansion is doing is really working on the space where our public interacts with the museum and where we present our exhibitions,” said Kanjo noting “The addition of an art park and ocean-view terraces will re-orient our entrance on Prospect Street making the building more user friendly.
“Kanjo said at least one structural issue will be “solved” by the retrofit.
“This is about properly scaling the physical space of our galleries,” she said adding, “right now all of our current building’s ceilings are less than 10 feet high. Contemporary art is often large. We’re going to have ceilings in the new building with our many galleries at 16 feet, and our special exhibition hall at 22 feet.”
Kanjo added windows will be strategically added to flesh out the facility’s space.