An acclaimed Kara Walker sculpture, abstractions by beloved painters of the past and present, and a video about two lizards in Covid-era New York are among the 158 artworks acquired last year by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, which revealed the newest pieces to enter its holdings on Tuesday.
Fifty of the artists behind those works have never before seen their art acquired by MOCA, one of LA’s top museums.
The Walker sculpture, Unmanned Drone (2023), is perhaps the most high-profile work of the bunch. It is currently on view in the exhibition “Monuments,” a co-production between MOCA and the Brick, and was created as a commission for the show. Formed from Confederate monuments whose pieces Walker reassembled, Unmanned Drone was named the most defining artwork of 2025 by ARTnews.
While Unmanned Drone rises 13 feet into the air, it is not the biggest artwork acquired by MOCA in 2025. That would be Olafur Eliasson’s 40-foot-tall 2024 installation Observatory for seeing the atmosphere’s futures, which was created for a MOCA show and acts as a kaleidoscope through which to view the sky visible above.
MOCA paid mind to smaller objects as well. In 2025, the museum also nabbed photographs by Lyle Ashton Harris, a ceramic sculpture by Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, and a drawing by Thomas Hirshhorn.
Also represented in the acquisitions are a range of big-name artists, among them Paul Pfeiffer, Julie Mehretu, Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Chan, Jonathas de Andrade, and Alex Israel. Below, a look at eight works acquired by MOCA in the past year.
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Leda Catunda, Sol com cérebro, 2023
Image Credit: ©Leda Catunda/Photo Ding Musa/Courtesy Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel/Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles This Brazilian artist started her career during the 1980s, at a time when Minimalist and Conceptualist strategies still loomed large in the nation she called home. Catunda instead embraced dazzling colors and forms that appeared soft and fleshy such as the ones seen in this painting. Her acquisition came on the heels of a retrospective abroad, at the Sharjah Art Foundation.
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Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, 2 Lizards, 2020
Image Credit: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles One of the defining artworks of the pandemic, this video follows 2 Lizards who take in New York during lockdown, visiting an empty Times Square and observing Covid birthday parties. The video went viral on social media when it was impossible to visit museums.
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An-My Lê, Security and Stabilization Operations, Marines II, 2003–4
Image Credit: ©An-My Lê/Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles An-My Lê initially tried to gain entry to war-torn Iraq as an “embed” before being denied and starting the series “29 Palms,” wherein she photographed a part of California’s Mojave Desert used as a training area for US Marines. That it is unclear where and when this picture takes place is part of the point.
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Shizu Saldamando, Lupe and Ashley, 2024
Image Credit: Photo Jeff McClane/©Shizu Saldamando/Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Here, Shizu Saldamando memorializes a moment of intimacy that might have taken place directly on top of the twin bedsheet she took as an artistic material. Saldamando exhibited this work and two others in a 2024 MOCA survey of Photorealism; the museum has now acquired the full trio.
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Jacqueline Humphries, JH123, 2024
Image Credit: Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery/Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Jacqueline Humphries is one of our great painters, working in a way that often makes it unclear which of her gestures are handmade and which are produced digitally. Despite the fact that it appears otherwise, JH123 has been painted by hand.
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Yolanda López, Las Santas Locas, 1979
Image Credit: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles For a series documenting an all-female car club called Las Santas Locas, Yolanda López turned her lens on the people who frequented it. The club’s members pose here with a shirt bearing the club’s logo in an image that memorializes friendship among Chicana women.
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Sawako Goda, Automatism series: Toe Sensation 1993
Image Credit: ©Estate of Sawako Goda/Courtesy Nonaka Hill Gallery/Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Sawako Goda furthered the Surrealist tradition of automatic drawing, wherein an artist works in a way that cedes all control to the inner workings of their mind. To make this drawing, she placed pastel crayons between her toes and moved her feet around.
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Ali Eyal, Look What I Remember, 2024
Image Credit: ©Ali Eyal/Courtesy ChertLüdde, Berlin/Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Many of Ali Eyal’s paintings are based on his upbringing in Iraq, where he experienced the violence of US military operations firsthand. Now based in LA, Eyal is on the fast ascent: he won a $100,000 award for his participation in the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA biennial this year, and he will figure in the Whitney Biennial in New York in March.
