
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Coastal contemporary art galleries built around a preserved nineteen-sixteen concrete residence.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego starts in 1896, when newspaper heiress Ellen Browning Scripps bought a bare bluff-top lot for eight hundred dollars, and follows the concrete home architect Irving Gill later built there. It traces how a handful of La Jolla artists pooled money in 1941 to buy the house back for ten thousand dollars, and how later gifts, from a single donor's multimillion-dollar bequest to a semiconductor fortune, transformed that scrappy art center into the museum you see now. Look at the facade and consider how many hands its history has passed through.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego - Downtown
Former railway baggage depot turned contemporary art space, with a steel luggage sculpture along its arcade.
The San Diego Museum of Art
Plateresque-style art museum with a facade carved with life-size portraits of Old Masters.
Marston House
Craftsman mansion of redwood and shingle, built for a department-store magnate on five acres of gardens.
Mingei International Museum
Folk art and craft museum in a hand-crafted historic hall, where artisan-built furniture doubles as the exhibit.
Spanish Village Art Center
Former World's Fair courtyard turned working art colony of studios around a tiled Spanish-style plaza.
Timken Museum of Art
Intimate gallery of European old masters and American paintings amassed by two secretive sisters.