As the Los Angeles County Museum of Art marks its 50th anniversary, CEO Michael Govan discusses the museum's past, present and future; the museum's coming exhibitions include a showcase for the late L.A. assemblage artist, Noah Purifoy.
LACMA director Michael Govan on the museum's past, present and future
Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, spoke with The Frame about the museum's history and its future at a live event celebrating the museum's 50th anniversary. Govan, who joined the museum in 2006, oversees its programming and the planned overhaul of the museum's 20-acre campus.
LACMA is the largest encyclopedic museum in the western United States, with a collection of more than 120,000 works spanning the history of art. Last year, the museum drew 1.23 million visitors — up 50 percent from when Govan joined as director.
The museum started as part of the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art in Exposition Park, with its first artistic work, George Bellows' "Cliff Dwellers," acquired in 1916. Titans of the time, J. Paul Getty and William Randolph Hearst, donated works to the museum, but it remained small.
"As it grew, the trustees decided it was time for a real museum — its own home," Govan sais. "[They] identified the space in Hancock Park, on Wilshire Boulevard, and it was in 1960 that the decision was made."
The museum opened in 1965, which Govan says was "a great moment of pride."
"There was an incredible founding spirit then. And you can feel the spirit of Los Angeles in the '60s — there were many difficult things going on. I mean, 1965 was a tough year — you think about the Watts riots, you think about a lot of things going on at that time — but the spirit of achievement, the bright future, I think was all packed into this new art museum," Govan says.
The anniversary has helped bring up some interesting stories from its history. The art blog Los Angeles County Museum on Fire looked into what happened to what was considered the museum's most important acquisition in its early days — a Francisco Goya painting. Within 10 years of the museum's opening, Govan says, it was no longer there. Turns out the painting most likely wasn't an authentic Goya, and it ended up in the collection of Imelda Marcos, wife of the Philippines' former dictator.
The museum's greatest strength when Govan came on as director, he says: "Location, location, location."
"Not only on Wilshire Boulevard in the sort-of-center of the giant metropolis of Los Angeles, but it's been the myth forever that Los Angeles is the city of the future. And the fact is, it is the city of the future. There are more artists working here today, I think, than any other city in the world, and I think that that sense of L.A. being an artistic capital is more palpable than ever."
Govan says he also believes the museum's collections are strong.
"Stronger than people think, in part because they're housed in sort of not-the-best buildings," Govan says. "And the physical plant was probably the biggest challenge — we only had 600,000 people a year coming to the museum, which is small for a big museum. And so we made it the primary goal to fix the facility, the park, the open space — and already that's resulted in doubling attendance. And you'll see in the future as we continue to develop the museum how much more accessible the collection will become."
Govan notes that the museum is still relatively young.
"We're at baby years by museum standards. The museums on the East Coast may have a hundred-plus years on us, 150 years. So, that means the shape of our collection is very different. You couldn't buy European masterworks — Caravaggios, things like that — by the time 1965 rolls around. Not that we don't have masterpieces, but it affects the collection."
The newness of the museum has helped lead to its emphasis on contemporary art, Govan says, along with L.A. being a big place for contemporary art in the '60s.
"There's a sense of youthfulness that is positive. People [on the East Coast] said when LACMA was started, It's too late to build such a museum — all the masterpieces are gone. It didn't turn out to be the case. It gives the museum a different shape, and that shape is going to become more and more important as the world keeps changing, as geopolitics shifts to Asia and Latin America," Govan says.
Govan says museums used to be evaluated based on the size of their collections, but thanks to everything from the Internet to airplane travel, it's more important today for a museum's collection to have both quality and character.
"What does the museum express of us — our time, our civilization, our place on Earth and how we view things from Los Angeles?" Govan says. "I think, in '65, the idea was to be a version of what existed and started earlier on the East Coast. Now, we're in advance thinking about the demographics of the country, investing in Latin American art more than any other museum, and it's really about shaping the program, the worldview."
The museum's current mission is not to expand, but to improve the museum's quality, accessibility and efficiency, Govan says.
"The three older buildings built in 1965, plus the building built in the '80s that comprise the biggest block of buildings, are badly in need of repair. In fact, in a few years, they won't be operable. The estimates to fix them range anywhere from 280-to-350 million dollars, without any cosmetic improvements. That's just code [upgrades]— seismic and other things," Govan says.
The way that people visit museums changes all the time, Govan says, with today bringing a more diverse group of visitors, including families.
"So to spend all that money on an old model makes no sense. Also, those buildings are very vertical, so whatever you put on the upper floors is not visited as much. So the idea that the trustees agreed to in 2001 and again now is, Why not just start from scratch?" Govan says.
The older buildings were designed by William Pereira. Govan says that while people have said they represent 1960s L.A., "the buildings aren't there. They've been mangled, eat up. The pools aren't there, the entrance is gone — the whole soul of them isn't there anymore. It's just the interiors, and the interiors were what people complained about in '65."
The plan is to keep the newest additions, the Broad Museum for Contemporary Art and the Resnick Pavilion, plus the Pavilion for Japanese Art, designed by Bruce Goff, who worked with Frank Lloyd Wright. Govan describes it as a "beautiful, crazy, wonderful building, that architecture students come from all around the world to see."
The older buildings are being removed, Govan says, in order to replace them with "one, simple facility." Govan has a big task ahead of him — the plans need to pass an environmental impact review, and he has to raise $475 million to make it happen.
One difficulty with being a younger museum — the lack of an acquisitions budget.
"We're one of the only large museums in that case," Govan says. "A lot of the acquisitions, endowments or budgets that were established for museums — Cleveland has many many millions every year — were established at the turn of the century, they were invested, and now they're really worth something."
LACMA has a different approach to building its permanent collection.
"Every work of art that comes into LACMA is a private donation — either a donation of artwork, or a donation of money to acquire an artwork," Govan says. "It's pretty hard, because you're always trying to talk people into supporting that museum, but there's something that's great about the honesty of the back-and-forth and needing to convince people rather than just having the chance to do it top down."
The poor condition of LACMA's buildings have made acquiring art difficult at times.
"The building's just a frame. A lot of people wouldn't put their collections in the existing facilities, for example, and one of those was Mr. [Jerrold] Perenchio, who had one of the very best collections in the United States, including Impressionist masterpieces," Govan says. "When we came forward with the idea of a building program, he said, 'Well, if LACMA's going to be serious about that, maybe I'll leave my collection here.'"
That collection includes works by Degas, Monet and Bonnard.
"That resulted in the single largest promise of art to LACMA in our history," Govan says. "The theme of the 50th anniversary for me, to try to communicate to the public [is], you can rebuild buildings — they're frames, they create accessibility, they have to be efficient. But it's about the art, and so this 50th anniversary has been about gifts of art."
The museum is also working on creating an audience as diverse as the city where it's located.
"Not every culture has museum-going as part of growing up, so you have to see that as maybe a many-generation effort. You're not going to turn on a switch and have everybody change their lifestyles, everyone of every diverse background. So it's a slow and methodical process," Govan says.
The museum has doubled its percentage of Latino visitors, Govan says, and Asian audiences are also growing.
"Part of it is programming — we have probably the most active programming in Korean art, for example, and there are hundreds of thousands of Koreans a stone's throw from LACMA. We are the most active I think today in acquisitions, and programming in Latin American art."
But there's more to reaching out to those audience than just growing those collections.
"You don't program Korean and Latin American art because you assume Koreans and Latin Americans only want to see that art," Govan says. "They want to see every kind of art, like I think we all do. But you have to create a sense of identity and comfort within the museum. If we don't show a lot of Latin American art, why go to LACMA if there's no identity built in for that culture and that thinking?"
The target for Govan's work on updating LACMA: to open the revamped museum before the new subway stop opens in front of the museum in 2023.
"That will be game changing for the entire region," Govan says, "to have that Wilshire Purple Line, and then to have a stop right at the museum makes it super accessible."
Mark your calendars now.
Noah Purifoy's art gave new life to old junk. Now it's going to LACMA
Out in the Mojave Desert, not far from Joshua Tree, down a narrow paved road and then a bumpy dirt road — and then an even bumpier dirt road — is the junk wonderland known as the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum.
Sprawled across 10 acres of scrubby desert floor are dozens of large sculptures and assemblages made from cast-off building materials, toilets, bowling balls, car tires and a myriad of repurposed household objects. A sculpture that twists like a water slide is made from the kind of flat aluminum sheet pans you’d find in a bakery. A train is constructed from bicycle wheels, beer kegs and vacuum cleaner parts. Carefully arranged tableaus of weather-beaten objects and furniture look like sets for a surreal Western.
Artist Noah Purifoy made all of these pieces when he lived here from 1989 until his death in 2004, says Franklin Sirmans, the head of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Sirmans and art historian Yael Lipschutz are co-curators of Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada, an exhibition that will bring eight of the desert sculptures to LACMA, along with a sampling of the artist’s earlier work.
In a way, the show is a homecoming for Purifoy. The African-American sculptor and visual artist was born in Alabama but spent much of his adult life in Los Angeles, attending art school, doing social work and helping to establish the Watts Towers Art Center. It was in L.A. that Purifoy started working with junk, making artwork out of charred debris he gathered after the Watts riots in 1965. “That experience really set him on his path as an artist,” Lipschutz says. “He never used new materials again.”
Some art critics think the desert landscape and the quality of the light drew Purifoy to the Mojave at the age of 72. But Joe Lewis, president of the Noah Purifoy Foundation, says the artist wasn’t thinking about aesthetics when he accepted an invitation to live in a small trailer on a friend’s desolate property. “Living in Los Angeles was very expensive then, as it is now,” Lewis says. “He was broke. He really had nowhere to go.”
Pat Brunty is the caretaker of the 10-acre site. She met Purifoy during the artist’s final years, when he hired her and her late husband to help straighten up the place. "He [said], 'When you do things out here, you do it my way or you don't,'" she recalls. "And he [said], 'If you can't follow my rules, then I don't need you.'" Purifoy soon warmed to the Bruntys, however, and enlisted them to build one of his final works, a wooden structure based on a gallows featured in the 1968 Clint Eastwood movie, "Hang ‘Em High."
"We said, 'We’re not an artist or anything,'" Brunty says. “He [said], 'You will be, [by the] time I get through with you.'" Today, the stark white gallows stands tall among the other outdoor installations — but you’ll have to go to the desert to see it. It’s not among the works making the trip to LACMA.
Knowing Purifoy had to leave Los Angeles because he couldn’t sell his work, one wonders how he’d feel about being shown at LACMA now, 10 years after his death. Lewis says the artist wasn’t thinking about fame or money when he turned all that junk into art in the middle of nowhere. “I think he did it because he had to do it,” Lewis says. “He came out here and said, I’m gonna make me a world. And he proceeded to do that.”
Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada can be seen June 7, 2015 – February 28, 2016 at LACMA.