MOCA Mobilization sends over petition results

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The board of trustees of the financially-strapped Museum of Contemporary Art is meeting today to discuss the two bailout proposals on the table: A merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or a $30-million donation offer from Eli Broad. No guarantees that either option will be chosen.

But in the meantime, the highly vocal, artist-led MOCA Mobilization, a 3,300-member citizens group supporting the museum, has delivered a petition to the MOCA board. The petition, signed by 3,200 people, condemns the merger plan and advocates ‘an autonomous MOCA.’ They don’t like the idea of a MOCA-LACMA, which indeed sounds like something one might order at Starbucks.

Read the full text after the jump:

--Diane Haithman

The petition:

‘We call upon the Trustees to maintain MOCA’s independence and to keep its collection intact and accessible to a wide and appreciative public’. The petition supplements the signatures of over 400 people who attended MOCA Mobilization’s rally in support of the museum held at the Geffen Contemporary on November 23rd 2008.

In light of yesterday’s announcement by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
‘outlining the terms of a proposed merger’, MOCA Mobilization makes the
following statement:

We support an independent and autonomous MOCA. We condemn any plan now or in the future to merge MOCA with any other institution. MOCA’s artistic integrity and vitality, acknowledged locally and globally, can only be served by its existence as an independent museum, and not as a department or program at LACMA, whose mission as an encyclopedic museum must appropriately frame its numerous programs.

LACMA’s press release of December 16th states: ‘The goal of this plan would be to preserve the independence and integrity of both institutions while combining their operations and infrastructure.’ This is not a definition of ‘independence’ that we accept. We at MOCA Mobilization want the reality of independence - not the appearance of it.

We demand that the MOCA Board of Trustees honor MOCA’s local and international leadership in contemporary art by maintaining the museum’s autonomy.’