Frank Gehry Withdraws from LA MoCA Architecture Exhibition

Frank Gehry has withdrawn from a major architecture exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, only four weeks before its opening date. Christopher Hawthorne of the Los Angeles Times reports this will potentially force the show to move to a new venue if not be canceled altogether. Discussing his reasons for withdrawal, Gehry shared: “I didn’t feel comfortable in it. It didn’t seem to be a scholarly, well-organized show.” He added that “I’m subject to misunderstanding about the seriousness of my work. People assume I am just crumpling paper and so forth. This was feeling a bit that way, a trivialization.” Hawthrone writes that “Gehry was not just the central focus of the show, but its pivotal figure. Once he made it clear he would not participate, LA MoCA was left to reconceive the entire show on the fly.”

Organized by guest curator Christopher Mount, the exhibition, “A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture From Southern California,” chronicles the history of architecture in Southern California over the past twenty-five years. It received a grant from the Getty Foundation for $445,000 as part of the institution’s sponsored series, Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in LA, and was the only show to receive such significant funding. Said Mount: “I think that the last twenty-five years of architecture in LA has been a remarkable period, and I think a major institution should be supporting this exhibition. What I would like to see is a community uprising, so to speak, where these thirty-four firms stand up and say, ‘You can’t cancel a show that’s four weeks away.’”