LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Museum of Contemporary Art presents Diary of Flowers: Artists and Their Worlds, a new collection exhibition bringing together more than eighty artworks from MOCAs renowned collection. On view from March 9, 2025 through January 4, 2026 at MOCA Grand Avenue, the exhibition explores how artists create their own worlds through artmaking. Diary of Flowers: Artists and Their Worlds features work in all media across different geographies, cultures, and periods by artists including Belkis Ayón, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mona Hatoum, Candice Lin, Annette Messager, Wangechi Mutu, Lucas Samaras, Mohammed Sami, Tunga, and Haegue Yang, as well as a gallery fully dedicated to Nan Goldin.
Whether building networks, social circles, or personal mythologies, the works included in Diary of Flowers: Artists and Their Worlds privilege sites of creativity and the place of the imagination to conjure new worlds and possibilities. The exhibition demonstrates how themes like friendship, love, and intimacy can be important starting points for artistic expression. Embracing the boundaries between the personal and the social, public and private lives, and emotional and psychological states, audiences are invited to more intimately understand the environment that artists cultivate for themselves and one another.
Diary of Flowers: Artists and Their Worlds provides a glimpse of how artists across different times and geographies respond to the world they live in, demonstrating the power of the imagination to conjure and create new ways of being, said Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs at MOCA. We are thrilled to bring audiences on a journey that explores the Polish-American exchange of the early 1980s, the fertile ground that Mexico City provided artists in the 1990s, Nan Goldins series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and more.
Diary of Flowers: Artists and Their Worlds is organized by Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Paula Kroll, Curatorial Assistant, and Ariana Rizo, Curatorial Assistant.