Free Third Thursday

Join us for an evening at MOCA with galleries open late, live music by KXCI Community Radio, Food by Maya’s Cajun Kitchen, and drinks by Brick Box Brewery!  

This month, the plaza will be activated with Stay Gold + Urgent Care Yard Signs and a Stay Gold Mural Showcase! Celebrate the outcomes of MOCA’s spring Stay Gold workshop, hosted by Lorr Inzalaco, exploring identity through self-portraiture. Visitors will have the opportunity to view a temporary installation of a mural and yard signs created by Stay Gold participants in collaboration with Urgent Care Art, a project by artists Lex Gjurasic and Eli Burke that spotlights emerging and underrepresented queer visual artists in Tucson and Southern Arizona through temporary exhibitions in unconventional spaces.

Visitors can also participate in a zine-making workshop with teaching artist Emily Cole centered around the question: how can social justice and art intersect to affect change? Cole will guide participants in creating their own zines and give some insight into the history and significance of the art medium. Participants will explore new ways of self-expression and critical thinking through collage, sketching and written word, and will learn more about challenging traditional, academic, or mainstream media narratives through this Do-It-Yourself, tactile media. 

About Stay Gold
Stay Gold is a free intergenerational LGBTQIA+ arts program at MOCA for youth and adults ages 13 and up. In support of our commitment to intergenerational learning, individuals of all generations, including youth 13 – 18, adults over 55, and everyone in-between are encouraged to participate.

About Urgent Care Art
Urgent Care Art is a collaborative project by queer artists Lex Gjurasic and Eli Burke that spotlights emerging and underrepresented queer visual artists in Tucson and Southern Arizona through temporary, immersive exhibitions in unconventional spaces. Responding to an urgent need for visibility, access, and experimentation in the local arts ecosystem, the project invites artists to work beyond the constraints of traditional galleries—materially, conceptually, and politically. For this iteration, artists are asked to reimagine the political yard sign as a site where the personal becomes explicitly political, particularly in relation to queer identity, visibility, and belonging. By queering exhibition formats and embedding art within everyday community spaces, Urgent Care Art challenges inherited boundaries, troubles normative assumptions, and expands who art is for, where it lives, and how it speaks.

About Emily Cole
Emily Cole (they/she) is a multidisciplinary artist and visual storyteller based in Tucson (Cuk Ṣon), Arizona. Their work spans editorial photography, alternative cameraless processes, printmaking, as well as archival and textile collage. Addressing climate change, gender and sexuality justice, and decolonial thought, Cole’s creative practice serves as an extension of their work as an activist

 

About the Exhibitions

On view in the East Wing Galleries is Living With Injury, an exhibition centering the environmental justice movement led by Mexican American community members in their fight against defense industry pollution that caused widespread illness in the southside of Tucson in the 1980s. Featuring archival materials, and the work of local artists, journalists, researchers, and community members, the project reflects on the power of community organizing, disability justice, and collective healing in the face of environmental racism.

Light as Resistance is an exhibition of paintings, drawings, video, and a site-specific wall painting by Hilma’s Ghost, an artist collective formed by Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray. Influenced by spiritual and esoteric knowledge systems, histories of abstraction, and research recovering the legacies of overlooked women artists, their name pays homage to the Swedish mystic and painter Hilma af Klint, who is now recognized as one of the first abstract artists in Western art history. Working collaboratively—with one another, with spiritual practitioners, and with unseen energies—the collective incorporates practices like ritual, divination, automatic drawing, and color magic into their artmaking process.

 

Monthly Free Thursdays are presented in collaboration with KXCI Community Radio.