One city. Two art museums looking for leaders.
And not just any art museums. Both are among Los Angeles' premier artistic showcases, and their future directors will play leading roles in shaping the city's cultural vitality.
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Room at the Top at 2 L.A. Museums
It's rare at any given time for more than one big art institution in a city to need a new chief. But Getty and LACMA won't be competing.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday April 12, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 83 words Type of Material: Correction
LACMA compensation -- An article in Section A on Sunday incorrectly said tax records for the fiscal year that ended in June 2003 indicate that Deborah Gribbon, former director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, received $301,226 from Museum Associates, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's private support group, and $104,899 from Los Angeles County. The article should have said the documents indicate that both sums were paid to Andrea L. Rich, president and director of LACMA, who has announced her retirement.
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The J. Paul Getty Museum, a world-renowned jewel box that's the public face of the $6.8-billion Getty Trust, lost its director in October. Deborah Gribbon, 56, a 20-year Getty veteran at the helm of the museum since 2000, resigned abruptly, citing philosophical differences with trust President Barry Munitz.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the largest all-encompassing art museum west of Chicago and the leading publicly supported art institution in Southern California, also needs a new chief. Andrea L. Rich, 61, its president and director, announced Monday that she would retire in November, ending a 10-year tenure. Her announcement came amid power struggles over governance of a planned facility for contemporary art, funded and named for the museum's most visible trustee, philanthropist Eli Broad.
Those in the know don't take these vacancies lightly.
"It's as if the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York had openings for directors at the same time," said Millicent Hall Gaudieri, executive director of the New York-based Assn. of Art Museum Directors, which represents directors of 175 museums in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
"I can't remember when there have been two large institutions with openings in one city," she added.
The period of simultaneous headhunting will be "a critical time" for Los Angeles, said Richard Koshalek, president of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and former director of L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art. "The decisions that these museums make now are going to define how people perceive Los Angeles far into the future."
The Getty's search has barely begun, and LACMA's has yet to take shape, but the two museums have plunged into a highly competitive job market. The museum directors group lists 20 openings for directors, "as high a number as we've had in a long time," Gaudieri said.
"Some of it has to do with retirement," she added. "We have a generation issue here. But it concerns me that we have so many large institutions looking for directors."
Potential candidates for the L.A. jobs are likely to consider comparable open positions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
