Fourth Wall: Arturo Herrera

Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson recently received a generous grant from the Diane & Bruce Halle Foundation to support Fourth Wall, A series of Wall Drawings, Murals and Wall Paintings at MOCA Tucson. Fourth Wall brings together the intersecting, place-based contexts related to architecture, viewership, materiality, and authorship. In its first iteration (2026-2028), the project will engage six contemporary artists with multidisciplinary and non-conventional practices in painting and drawing to produce a series of large-scale wall pieces that are responsive to the museum’s location. Artworks commissioned through Fourth Wall will be sited for a duration of six months on a large, exterior wall of the museum which faces Church Ave., a central street connecting downtown Tucson to Barrio Viejo. One of the oldest and most populated corridors in the city, Fourth Wall artworks will be viewable to thousands of residents and visitors who traverse this shared space. The first project is a commission of Arturo Herrera, artist based in Berlin, whose practice intertwines pop and queer iconography, gestural marks, and nonrepresentational shapes. Herrera’s wall painting will be on view in September 2026.

For this project, artists will be invited to either create new works or an artwork-as-instruction to be executed by local artists, museum personnel, or community members. This expansive approach to public art consciously embraces the conceptual art assertion that an artistmight provide an idea or a theme for an artwork that they don’t necessarily realize through their own specialized labor. In this way, Fourth Wall intentionally allows notions about authorship and collectivity to become complicated, and endeavors to blur the boundaries between permanence and ephemerality, as each subsequent work in the series will replace the former.

The series is organized by Executive Director Gabriela Rangel with the collaboration of Wesley Creigh and MOCA curatorial department.