The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) presents the 2026-2027 season of Wonmi's WAREHOUSE Programs, bringing historic, new, and site-specific live artworks to The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA on select dates from September 18, 2026 through March 2027. Founded in 2019, Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs has become a distinctive space within MOCA for artist-led experimentation, bringing audiences unique live art experiences that emphasize embodied, sensory, and time-based forms while exploring performance’s capacity to reflect on contemporary conditions and celebrate strength and connection.
The season opens with the iconic multi-disciplinary performance, Beat of the Traps, created by Mike Kelley, Anita Pace, and Stephen Prina, from September 18-20. Debuting in 1992 and reconstructed in 2025 in conjunction with Prina’s retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, this collaborative work bridges the decades between its conception and current iteration and assembles a dance performance, a percussion recital, a rock drum solo, a music fanatic’s vaudevillian monologue about rock star excess, and the number one song on Billboard’s Hot 100 at the time of the performance. Beat of the Traps is presented in Los Angeles for the first time in over thirty years.
The season continues with two world premieres and one US premiere. On October 3, Democracy Sessions, a festival of music concerts and happenings, returns to WAREHOUSE. Conceived with the orchestral collective Wild Up (founded in Los Angeles in 2010), this iteration aligns with the build-up to the US midterm elections and again considers how civic institutions, like museums and orchestras, can reinvigorate the promise of democracy through the lenses of creation and participation. Expanded to include partners across Los Angeles, the festival opens with the US premiere of British composer Oliver Leith’s acclaimed large-scale work for orchestra and community, Garland, featuring 130 performers arranged in a spectacular procession of music, movement, and sound. From October 23-25, Los Angeles-based artist Emily Mast premieres her new work PLAY: A Play, an improvisational performance framework that explores the contradictions of freedom and authority, individuality and interdependence, control and surrender. Unscripted, the work emerges in response to the performers’ instincts, negotiations, failures, and discoveries in real time.
From December 11-12, Figuring Space invites four Los Angeles-based artists–AMMA (Alexsa Durrans & Miles Brenninkmeijer), Gurmukhi Desai Bevli, jeremy de’jon guyton, and Mamie Green / VOLTA–to respond to the architecture of WAREHOUSE through movement and sound. Tokyo-based artist duo MES (Takeru Arai and Kanae Tanikawa) bring the season to a close with the world premiere of their first durational performance installation,セイ/SE-I/SAY (2027), at WAREHOUSE in February 2027. A two-week durational performance installation, セイ/SE-I/SAY considers how the trans-Pacific exchange of radical socio-political ideologies in the first decades of the 20th century continues to shape contemporary concepts of community organizing, protest, and collective action.
“The forthcoming season of Wonmi's WAREHOUSE Programs foregrounds co-authorship, collaboration, and collective practice,” said Alex Sloane, MOCA Associate Curator and organizer of Wonmi's WAREHOUSE Programs. “At a time when we are wrestling with heightened divisions in public life, this season brings together an intergenerational group of LA-based and international artists working across pop, choreography, improvisation, durational performance, and community-led composition, to explore the myriad, often entangled, ways in which live art and, by extension, our socio-political moment can embody collectivity.”
For more information about Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs and to reserve advance tickets, please click HERE.
Pictured: Mike Kelley, Anita Pace, Stephen Prina. Beat of the Traps. 1992. Performed in Expanded Art, Wiener Festwochen, The Remise, Vienna, Austria, 1992. Performers (from left): Jonathan “Butch” Norton, Carl Burkley, Alan Abelew, Stephen Prina, Anita Pace, M.B. Gordy. Photo: Karl Krauss. © 2025 Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Anita Pace, Stephen Prina
