MOCA GA opens its permanent West Midtown home

Atlanta's contemporary art scene has a permanent address now. The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, known as MOCA GA, opened its long-awaited home at 1260 Foster Street NW in West Midtown on the Goat Farm Arts Center campus, with Mayor Andre Dickens cutting the ribbon on September 14. The museum's whole reason for being is to collect, preserve and show contemporary art by Georgia artists, and the new building gives that mission a lot of room to grow.

The building itself is worth a look. Designed by the Atlanta firm Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, the 26,306-square-foot space runs with large glass windows, rust-colored metal siding and steel supports. Inside you'll find five galleries, a tiered auditorium, a library, programming spaces, offices, a rooftop with panoramic views, event space and a sculpture garden. It's a $16.4 million project put together through a capital campaign of philanthropic contributions and $2 million from the City of Atlanta, and its stated goal is to create a forum for active interchange between artists and the community.

What's inside is the real story. MOCA GA's permanent collection now holds more than 1,600 works by 375 Georgia artists, a huge jump from the 250 works by 110 artists the collection started with when the museum was founded in 2000. Its first exhibition was held in February 2002, and since then it's grown to include names like Nellie Mae Rowe, Lamar Dodd and Radcliffe Bailey, among more than 40 others. Rowe, a self-taught African American folk artist born in Fayetteville in 1900, built her work around racism, gender, domesticity, African American folklore and spiritual traditions. Dodd, born in Fairburn in 1909, was a painter and university administrator who gave his name to the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia and worked as a NASA artist on future missions, including the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

If you're planning a visit, there's plenty to see right now. The inaugural exhibition, From the MOCA GA Permanent Collection: Works from 1949 – 2025, runs alongside La aleatoriedad de los símbolos / The Randomness of the Symbols by Wilay Méndez Páez, which opened on October 24 and runs through January 2, 2027. Méndez Páez is the museum's 2025-2026 Working Artist Project Fellow, and an artist talk is set for Tuesday, November 10, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. After that, Studio Apprentices: From the 2024/2025 & 2025/2026 Working Artist Project, curated by David Brenneman, opens on November 7. A new group of Working Artist Project Fellows — Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn, Sonya Yong James and Marie Munk — has also joined the program, selected by 2026-2027 guest curator Evan Garza.

On the practical side, the museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. and closed Mondays and Sundays. Admission is $15 for non-members, and free for members, children 6 and under, and military and veterans. Paid parking is in the deck directly across from the entrance at the base of the Goat Farm apartments, but parking is limited, so Uber, Lyft and carpooling are encouraged. By transit, MARTA takes you to Art Center Station, then a Route 14 bus or a short ride the rest of the way.