Los Angeles Museum of Art

Founded 2012 by Alice Könitz Alice Könitz designed The Los Angeles Museum of Art in December 2012. A combined artist’s project and experimental exhibition venue, LAMOA is a modular wooden space with an open plan and sliding walls, adaptable to a variety of presentations. Könitz invites individual artists to create work specifically for the LAMOA space, playing with the structure’s capabilities and changing its form with each new exhibition.  Könitz views the preservation and exhibition of a collection as central to the purpose of a museum and therefore presents LAMOA’s collection for Made in L.A. Her presentation for the show follows the precedent of other touring museum collections, such as the Musée d’Orsay and the Barnes Foundation. Typically such exchanges between museums create institutional goodwill and benefit the organizing institution with an additional stream of income while attracting large audiences for the hosting institution. LAMOA inverses this trend: given the size and infancy of LAMOA, Made in L.A. is the first time that most visitors will encounter Könitz’s project. Her collection combines a mixture of objects owned by LAMOA and, therefore, by the artist herself. The exhibition also includes work borrowed from artists, further complicating the traditional idea of a museum collection.