L.A. County Art Museum Nears Hiring of Director

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is close to naming a new director, sources say, and the leading candidate is Michael J. Govan, director of the New York-based Dia Art Foundation and a specialist in contemporary art.

After a quarterly museum trustees meeting Wednesday, the facility's top staff and board officials stressed that no vote had been taken to appoint a new director, and museum employees said no staff announcement had been made.

"We are still interviewing and going through the process," said Nancy Daly Riordan, a trustee and head of the museum search committee. "We have not finalized our search."

However, two sources inside the museum and one outside, all insisting on anonymity, said that in recent weeks the search committee apparently has focused on a single name.

Govan, 42, has served the last 11 years as director of Dia, which owns one of the world's foremost collections of art made since 1960.

Efforts to reach him Wednesday were unsuccessful.

Under Govan's leadership, Dia has dramatically changed direction, abruptly losing nearly half of its board members in the mid-1990s, then gaining a new set of donors. In the shift, Dia reduced its emphasis on bankrolling remote projects in the desert Southwest and stepped up efforts to bring art to broad audiences.

The culmination of that shift was a $50-million campaign, led by Govan, to convert an old 31-acre Nabisco factory in Beacon, N.Y., into a vast exhibition space for contemporary art. The Dia:Beacon site opened to great fanfare in 2003, featuring work from such artists as Andy Warhol and Richard Serra.

LACMA trustees Eli Broad and Peter Norton -- both members of the museum's director search committee -- have made Dia donations large enough to be listed as members of the Dia Art Council.

"Michael flies his own plane, and that's a [sign of] the kind of ambitious self-starter he is," said Maxwell Anderson, former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and a principal with AEA Consulting.

"Michael is someone who will be always challenging himself, which is one of his strengths," Anderson added. "It would be good to have him in that seat" at the Los Angeles County museum.

The director's seat has been empty since November, when Andrea Rich ended her 10-year tenure. But the museum has been searching for a successor since April, when Rich disclosed her plans to leave.