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The Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego (MCASD) is coming in hot from a record-breaking summer. More visitors, more members, more things to celebrate and more celebrations than ever before.
On the heels of a star-studded show that drew thousands to its galleries, MCASD has just opened another exhibit meant to draw in new audiences, “Visiones Nocturnas: Queer Nightlife in Contemporary Art,“ It continues through mid-January.
“What is always passionate or interesting about contemporary art is that we are a place where we can bring these dialogues forward that are groundbreaking or just new to a lot of people,” said Scott Anderson, MCASD’s chief advancement officer.
The museum also is welcoming a new director and CEO, Brett Littman. He visited MCASD as a UC San Diego student, and what he saw inspired his three-decade career at cultural institutions in the U.K. and New York.
Littman attended the “Visiones Nocturnas” preview party a couple weeks ahead of when his official tenure begins on Oct. 1.
“I really want to make this museum into a place where you want to come again and again and again, and that people from all over the country and all over the world want to as well,” Littman told attendees. “The museum deserves that. It is always great.”
For Anderson, the timing, coming off Giants and into “Visiones” with a new CEO, “creates an exciting runway for the institution to continue to engage the entire city and raise our national platform.”
“I see a very bright future ahead for the museum,” he said.
Compare that outlook with what some of MCASD’s peers are facing. The oldest San Diego art institution, San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park, laid off 11 employees in August amid its centennial celebration. The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), which has locations in Balboa Park and Encinitas, announced it had laid off nearly half its staff, including almost all its senior staff. In addition, the Balboa Park ICA campus is temporarily closed.
The two art institutions blamed rising operational costs, a decline in grants and donations, and a decrease in visitors (both of them felt the impact of ongoing Balboa Park parking fees, set to end Dec. 31). It’s a tough economic time for arts across the country, including at MCASD, with leaders noting that philanthropy is hard to come by.
But a decline in visitors? That’s not something the La Jolla museum faced during the record-breaking run of “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.” Close to 40,000 people made the trek to La Jolla to see the stars’ personal collection, which coincided with a second exhibit from local Latino photographers called “Hometown Heroes.”
Compare that number, which breaks down to 2,300 admissions per week, to three years before, when MCASD’s weekly admissions hovered between 722 and 1,065.
And the spike in visitors means money. “Giants” brought in over $300,000 in admissions, plus an additional $330,000 in gift shop sales.
Part of the impetus behind “Giants,” which first opened at the Brooklyn Museum, was to showcase African diasporic artists who may never have been featured in museums. During its run in San Diego, Black faces filled the artwork on the brightly-colored museum walls, but they gazed at it as well. A huge influx of Black locals came to see it.
“This necessity for museums to be open and embracing of many communities is also part of their enduring longevity,” said the organizing curator for “Giants” at MCASD, Amy Crum. “So I think that’s part of how we continue.”
Of course, that exhibit had ties to two famous musicians, who made appearances at the exhibit’s opening and closing parties. It also included some of the top living visual artists in the world, like Kehinde Wiley, Derrick Adams and Mickalene Thomas.
The upcoming “Visiones Nocturnas” doesn’t have quite the same celebrity cache. But it aims to build on the lessons of “Giants” with a preview, wrap-up party and other events designed to draw in the community. For “Giants,” those parties naturally married visual art with music. “Visiones” has a similar tie between dance and visual art, so those popular, sold-out parties will continue.
“(In) an exhibition that’s highlighting the ways in which queer nightlife spaces have provided essential sites for belonging, particularly for Latin American and Latine diasporic communities, the presence of music only seems fitting,” said Crum, also the curator for “Visiones.”
At the preview party, San Diego ballroom leaders shared their art with the audience, with some attendees joining in for the walk-on fashion competitions.
“I am a child of queer and trans nightlife. And so I think that spaces like this, and how we’re really just storming institutions, is really necessary,” said artist Xelestial Moreno-Luz, who organized the ballroom expo.
The exhibit began with the work of Andres Payan Estrada, a photographer who splits time between the border towns of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez and Los Angeles. He documented queer nightlife spaces along the border over a decade, some of which disappeared during that time. His long-exposure photographs are printed on swaying, gauzy curtains in a full-room installation meant to conjure the feeling of being on a dance floor.
“It’s not necessarily that people walk away with some kind of simulated experience of a queer nightlife space, but more that there is this reflection on the the vitality of these spaces, the ways in which queer nightlife functions differently for diasporic communities, and this opportunity to create a sense of cultural belonging is essential and can happen in myriad ways,” Crum said.
“I hope that there’s like a little bit of a more expansive understanding of what belongs in that category, and that it’s not just nightclubs or bars.”
Inside the exhibit, a movement section includes dancing that is explicitly queer – like vogueing at a ballroom competition – but expands the view to other queer dance spaces as well, whether that’s a punk show in a warehouse or same-sex couples dancing the bachata at a backyard party.
“We’re hoping similarly that ‘Visiones’ will be another open invitation to different communities, but still San Diego,” Crum said.
Visiones Nocturnas: Queer Nightlife in Contemporary Art, through Jan. 17, 2027, Museum of Contemporary Art. General admission, $25, with discounts for locals, students, educators and seniors.
