Free Third Thursday

Join us for a free evening at MOCA with galleries open late, live music by KXCI Community Radio, food by Reservation Sensation, and drinks by Tap + Bottle!

This month, we celebrate the publication of the 2025 Sonoran Desert School Gardeners’ Almanac with talks, activities, food, and more. The Almanac is a love letter to the Sonoran Desert, its people, and its food heritage. Through this handbook, school gardens serve as a conduit for local knowledge holders to pass on heritage to learners who themselves become knowledge holders, establishing a cycle of connections between past, present and a promising future.

We also mark the conclusion of MOCA’s fall 2024 Stay Gold program with a chalk intervention on the museum’s exterior walls and plaza informed by the workshop’s activities – including drawing, writing, and nature walks – to creatively discuss environmental crises from the standpoint of empowerment and solidarity. The intervention is created collaboratively by Stay Gold participants to map “ecosystems of resistance” and draft letters to their future ancestors.

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About the Exhibitions

On view in the Great Hall is DEMO, a multimedia exhibition by artists Juan Obando and Yoshua Okón that explores the practice of “astroturfing”—a marketing ploy that generates fake public demonstrations intended to appear as grassroots political movements. On view in the East Wing Galleries is 500 Places at Once, an exhibition centering poet CAConrad that features a newly commissioned collection of three-dimensional poem sculptures; and Graves for the Rain, the first solo museum exhibition by artist and musician Karima Walker who works with sound, sculpture, and durational performance to consider ecological practices and grief in response to the hydrological death of the Santa Cruz River.

Third Thursdays are presented in collaboration with KXCI Community Radio.