Founded in 1976, the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (MoCP) is one of the world’s leading museums dedicated to photography and lens-based media. Located in Chicago’s South Loop, MoCP is an internationally recognized cultural institution that explores the role of the photographic image in contemporary life.
MoCP presents exhibitions by established and emerging artists from Chicago and around the world, with a particular focus on artists who engage with the social, political, and cultural issues shaping our time. Through photography, film, video, and other lens-based practices, the museum’s exhibitions examine subjects ranging from identity, race, migration, and human rights to environmental change, economic inequality, conflict, and the evolving ways images shape how we understand the world.
As the academic art museum of Columbia College Chicago, MoCP connects its exhibitions and collection with students, faculty, artists, scholars, and communities throughout Chicago. Its permanent collection includes more than 18,000 works by nearly 2,000 artists, representing significant developments in photography from the 19th century to the present, with particular strength in contemporary practice.
For fifty years, MoCP has provided a platform for ambitious exhibitions, new commissions, scholarship, education, and public dialogue. From its home on South Michigan Avenue, the museum serves as a gathering place where artists and audiences come together to consider the power of images and their relationship to the world around us.
