Jonas Wood is known for his hard-edged, exuberantly colored watercolor drawings and paintings, which frequently depict the everyday spaces of his studio and garden. Recurrent motifs such as potted plants in beautiful ceramic vessels made by his wife, ceramicist Shio Kusaka, appear against a backdrop of the clarion blue skies of Los Angeles. Wood trains his eye on these lush daily landscapes, often enlarging them to grand proportions that signal his fondness for small domestic pleasures. Wood's new work—a new outdoor mural designed specifically to wrap the exterior of MOCA Grand Avenue—gleefully exhibits a strong cut-and-paste sensibility through its layering of shapes and forms. Meant to be seen by pedestrians or through the windows of moving cars, Wood's mural treats the urban architecture of Downtown L.A. as a dynamic canvas on which to further explore his playful manipulation of scale, texture, color, and pattern.

This project by Jonas Wood is generously supported by MOCA’s Board of Trustees.