Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia sits inside a heavy, sandstone building with a face of pale, stacked stone blocks that look far older than the modern art inside. It served as the Maritime Services Board building for decades, holding bureaucrats who oversaw Sydney Harbor traffic. In nineteen eighty-nine, the state government handed the keys to the museum curators. Before the art arrived, workers discovered dozens of convict-era wells and foundations hidden beneath the basement floor, relics from Sydney’s earliest colonial days.