The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (or MCASD), in San Diego, California, USA, is an art museum focused on the collection, preservation, exhibition, and interpretation of works of art from 1950 to the present.
Founded in 1941 in La Jolla as The Art Center in La Jolla, a community art center, through the 1950s and 1960s the organization operated as the La Jolla Art Museum. The museum was originally the 1915 residence of philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps, designed by the noted architect Irving Gill.[1]
In the early 1970s, the name changed to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, focusing the purview on the period from 1950 to the present. In 1990, the Museum changed its name to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, acknowledging the larger geographic context and the population base of nearly 3 million in San Diego County, and opened another satellite facility downtown in 1993, further embracing the region. In 1996, a major renovation and expansion of MCASD La Jolla took place, designed by Robert Venturi of the firm Venturi Scott Brown & Associates. In 2007, a much larger downtown Museum was opened, designed by architect Richard Gluckman of Gluckman Mayner Architects, New York.
MCASD has a permanent endowment fund of over $40 million, and an annual operating budget of approximately $6 million. Annual support comes from a balanced mix of individuals, corporations, foundations, government agencies, and interest earned from the endowment, the majority of which came from a transformational 1999 bequest from Rea and Jackie Axline of more than $30-million.