The San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) and the City’s Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA) will merge into a single institution, effective July 1.
Under the terms of the merger, announced Tuesday, May 23, SDMA will create a new department, called Museum of Photographic Arts at the San Diego Museum of Art, where MOPA’s existing collection will reside. Currently, both institutions operate in nearby buildings in Balboa Park, the city’s central green space, home to most of its legacy cultural institutions.
“We will be able to share a bigger story told together through photography and in dialogue with our global collection, as both organizations share a commitment to promoting cultural understanding, education and diversity,” said Roxana Velásquez, Executive Director and CEO of SDMA. A statement. “By joining forces, we can achieve these goals more effectively.”
SDMA has organized 20 photography exhibitions over the past decade, including Cinematographic films: photographs by Gjon Mili (2018) and Black Lives Matter: Images of Resistance and Resilience (2019), thanks in part to the thousands of photographs that have joined its 22,000-piece collection over the past eight years. The MOPA collection, meanwhile, contains more than 9,000 images by more than 850 artists, in addition to nearly 22,000 books and other art objects that undermine the advancement and expansion of the medium.
Deborah Klochko, MOPA’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, is taking on the role of curatorial advisor during the merger, overseeing the photographic institution’s current exhibition schedule at its original location, which will remain open until 2024.
“MOPA has always been a museum that embraces change, from multiple community partners in our educational and film programs to bilingual texts for all of our exhibits,” Klochko said. NBC San Diego. “Together, with our similar missions and combined photography collections, there will be so much more for our audience.”
The merger with MOPA follows another major boost to SDMA’s collection recently. In March the museum received a bequest of $2.4 million from the estate of Janet Brody Esser, a sum that will support the acquisition and exhibition of works by black artists and artists from the African diaspora.
SDMA has received donations of over 200 books from Esser’s estate, as well as a selection of artworks from his collection. The bequest facilitated the institution’s acquisition of a multimedia work by Nick Cave and helped fund a recent exhibition by Justin Sterling.
