Orange County Museum of Art

The Orange County Museum of Art opened a striking new building at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa in late 2022, ending a years-long search for a permanent home and giving the institution something it had never quite had: a purpose-built contemporary art space equal to its collection. The building, designed by Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis, is a folded concrete-and-glass structure that reads as a statement from the street — angular, layered, unmistakably contemporary — and the interior spaces achieve what good contemporary art museums are supposed to do: natural light in the right places, walls that recede so the work reads clearly, and a sense of movement through the building that makes you want to keep going. It is one of the more architecturally significant buildings completed in Orange County in recent memory.

OCMA’s collection focuses on California and modern art from the postwar period forward, with a particular emphasis on work from the 1960s to the present. The Light and Space movement — artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Larry Bell, who worked in Southern California in the 1960s developing forms that dissolved the boundaries between art and environment — is well represented here, and seeing that work in a building with this quality of natural light gives it context that’s hard to replicate elsewhere. The permanent collection also includes significant holdings in abstraction, sculpture, and works on paper from regional artists whose careers are inseparable from the development of the Los Angeles art world.

The programming around the permanent collection includes rotating installations, artist talks, and an ongoing education program that makes the museum more active than a static collection visit. OCMA offers free general admission on the first Sunday of each month; check ocma.art for current program details. The location within Segerstrom Center puts the museum within walking distance of the concert hall buildings, making it a natural pairing with an evening performance. The surrounding arts campus also includes South Coast Repertory, and the combination of institutions in this few-block area gives Costa Mesa a cultural density unusual for an Orange County city.

Parking in the Segerstrom campus structures is generally available, though popular performance nights can fill the closest structures. Walking from the South Coast Plaza parking structures is also an option for visitors combining the museum with shopping. Admission hours and pricing are listed on OCMA’s website; the museum is typically closed Mondays.