As an institution committed to displaying a wide variety of cutting-edge art, MOCA exhibitions are rotated throughout the year. MOCA (formally the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia) publications serve as academic record for our institution which, unlike many other museums, does not have a permanent collection to document its institutional growth. Artist and group exhibition catalogues are a way of recording MOCA’s academic achievement and aid the museum in reaching its strategic goal of “becoming an intellectual centerpiece of the region and engage in national discourse.”
Growing up in Virginia Beach near the first NASA field center, Michael Kagan (born 1980) learned early in life to look toward the sky for inspiration. Now based in Brooklyn, the artist uses historical images from the NASA archives as source material for his paintings of rockets blasting off into the atmosphere and astronauts touching down on lunar landscapes. Heavily textured with precise strokes of oil paint, Kagan’s work brings a sense of tactile closeness to the otherworldly subject matter without sacrificing its awe-inspiring mystery. This clothbound accompaniment to Kagan’s solo exhibition I Was There When It Happened presents a wide selection of the artist’s paintings from the past decade, almost exclusively dedicated to space imagery. In addition to a foreword by collaborator and fellow Virginia Beach native Pharrell Williams, the book includes extensive contributions by Alison Byrne, Matthew Israel, and Bill Powers.
Published by Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art
Distributed by Artbook | D.A.P.
Text by Alison Byrne, Matthew Israel, and Pharrell Williams. Interview with the artist by Bill Powers
Edited by Todd Bradway
Specifications: Clothbound, 9 x 10.5 inches, 144 pages, 100 color
ISBN: 9781942884521
Retail: $49.95
In conjunction with the exhibition Michael Kagan: I Was There When It Happened the Museum has produced a poster of the painting Higher Places by the artist.
Specifications: 20 x 28 inches
Retail: $45.00
Extensively illustrated, a new 216-page hardback monograph published on the occasion of the exhibition Inka Essenhigh: A Fine Line organized by the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (March 17-August 19, 2018). Including a foreword by Alison Byrne, MOCA's Director of Exhibitions and Education, an essay by Heather Hakimzadeh, MOCA Curator and artist and writer Matthew Weinstein and an interview with artist Ryan McGinness.
Published by the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.
Retail: $45.00
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