The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is reopening on 8 October with a new building in the Segerstrom Center for the Arts complex in Costa Mesa, California.
The museum’s 24-hour opening celebration will include music, food, films, yoga and dancing. For the next 10 years, OCMA will offer free general admission.
“We welcome all to our new home,” said OCMA CEO and director Heidi Zuckerman (via designboom).
“We believe access to art is a basic human right, and so our new building beckons the many communities of Orange County and beyond to come and explore and make art part of their lives.”
Designed by Thom Mayne of architecture firm Morphosis Studio, the new $94 million museum offers 25,000 square feet of exhibition space.
The 53,000-square-foot structure doubles the size and exhibition space of the former museum in Newport Beach. It is home to galleries, educational spaces and a terrace for sculptures and events.
Free entry for the next 10 years
OCMA’s opening exhibitions are ’13 WOMEN’, ‘California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold’, ‘Fred Eversley: Reflecting Back (the World)’, ‘Sanford Biggers: Of many waters…’, and ‘Peter Walker: Minimalist Landscape’.
The museum’s new board president Lucy Sun said the team has “put together a brilliant and wide-ranging program to open our new home”.
“These five exhibitions pay tribute to our illustrious past while offering a glimpse of what people can expect from the new OCMA,” Sun added.
The Orange County Museum of Art’s collection includes more than 4,500 works, many of which are produced by artists with ties to California.
“We were really interested in creating a social space like the New York Public Library steps or the Met [museum] steps,” Mayne told the Art Newspaper.
“We wanted to create something very urban for this suburban environment.”
Images: Orange County Museum of Art
