LACMA May Be Where He Was Going All Along

Michael Govan grew up with a Picasso print on his wall and a Bambara mask from Africa on his door, one of those wooden antelope heads topped by horns. His parents took him to all the museums on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and he showed enough drawing talent to teach younger children how to depict the human form.

But Govan was good at baseball too and was a speedy centerfielder on his high school team until a fastball broke his wrist. He could have played again, but he thought of what another injury might do to his internship with a portrait artist in the capital. “I decided at that moment,” he said, “that art was more important.”

That was one turning point in his life, he said, and so was Thursday, when he agreed to become director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art after being quietly wooed for months.

Govan comes to L.A. from New York’s Dia Art Foundation at just 42 in a career that has been on a fast track but not a straight line. He went from being the protege of the Barnum of the museum world, Thomas Krens, the man who put Armani suits and motorcycles in Guggenheim galleries, to running a museum that refused to advertise because it took money away from art.

He went from studying Renaissance masters in Rome to bonding with artists whose works were neon lights and a volcano.

And he helped run a series of museums while still not convinced that was what he wanted to do: He could not get over the feeling that he’d made a mistake leaving the studio for the executive office. Until now, he said.

“Until I accepted the job yesterday, I always considered museums a temporary job,” the new LACMA director said Friday after announcement of his appointment. “Yesterday I realized, ‘I think it’s my career.’ ”

Ed Epping, the professor who became his mentor at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., recalls Govan as a studious youngster, a bit shy, who as a freshman did graduate-level studies in Renaissance art but avoided studio classes so he could “work on his own, uninstructed.”

Then they had “wonderful conversations about the role of representational imagery,” Epping said, and almost overnight Govan left that behind. His senior project was pure conceptual art, playing off the idea that what endured from many shows was not the work but the catalog. So he painted the pages of his catalog and put reproductions of them on the wall. “The book was the art,” Govan said, “and the paintings were the copy.”

It was an arts brochure he made for the school that drew the eye of Krens, the faculty member who had drawn the job of running the Williams College Museum of Art. “He hired me for the posters and catalogs,” Govan recalled, but he was soon curating a show comparing Picasso’s “Blind Minotaur” to Rembrandt’s etchings. Then he and another young staffer, Joseph C. Thompson, became Krens’ co-conspirators in a wild plan to create a contemporary art museum in a factory in North Adams, Mass., that once made Civil War uniforms.

Intriguing as that was, “I wanted to go back to art school,” Govan said, “and Tom wanted me to stay.” They found a compromise thanks to Alan Kaprow, who developed the art form called “happenings” and who taught at UC San Diego. He suggested that Govan commute and do a graduate project there on “the active chaos of the making of a museum,” Govan recalled. “He believed that someday artists would make museums.”

Govan dropped out of graduate school in 1988 when Krens was named director of the Guggenheim museums and asked him to move to New York. “You get hooked into things,” Govan said.

Some people thought he was too young for such titles, but Govan served as assistant director and deputy director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation during the years when Krens emerged as a lightning rod figure with his ambitions to create a worldwide network of architectural masterpiece Guggenheim museums that would be draws in themselves -- as is the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed mother ship on 5th Avenue -- and fund shows that would travel from one to another.

Some critics accused them of squandering funds on “worthless paper” when they bought conceptual pieces by pioneering Minimalists, and some of the artists were not happy either. Govan drew the job of making peace with sculptor Donald Judd, who had renovated a compound of buildings in Marfa, Texas, to display his work. Govan said he walked the streets there until a white pickup pulled up and Judd said, “Get in.” Judd began “telling me why museums are terrible ... too much money spent on buildings and not enough on art,” Govan said. “I thought to myself, ‘No, I’m going to prove him wrong.’ ”

Govan also noticed how there was no artificial light in Judd’s office, an idea he later used in Dia’s museum on the Hudson River in Beacon, N.Y.

He still had not given up on being an artist when he left the shadow of Krens in 1994 to head the Dia foundation, which had been established to provide stipends to artists, including Judd and Walter De Maria, who developed a mile-long “Lightning Field” in New Mexico. Dia had also converted warehouse space in Manhattan’s Chelsea district to display the neon art of Dan Flavin and works of Andy Warhol, among others.

Govan said he had demanded, as part of the deal, that he be able to finish his master’s degree, though that lasted only until he analyzed Dia’s books and found “a monstrous problem.” Next came classic museum politics: He insisted that the foundation needed an infusion of board members and fundraising to survive and “gave them the option of finding somebody else.” Instead, half his board resigned.

That’s when Govan took up a hobby, inspired by another Dia artist, James Turrell, at his “Roden Crater” project in an extinct Arizona volcano. An avid pilot, Turrell advised him, “Learn to fly,” and Govan did.

“Learning to fly was cheaper than therapy,” he said.

Later, the story of how he was flying up the Hudson and noticed an abandoned brick building that once made containers for Milk-Bone dog biscuits was exaggerated. In the retelling, it sometimes had him landing on a makeshift runway to seal the deal. In fact, it was several weeks before he checked out the property that became Dia:Beacon, which opened in 2003 with installations by 24 artists -- including Richard Serra, Robert Irwin, Michael Heizer and Warhol -- and virtually no advertising or promotion.

The museum was made possible largely by a single benefactor, Leonard Riggio, the chairman of Barnes & Noble Inc. who had become Dia’s guardian angel after viewing three of Serra’s massive “Torqued Ellipses” at its Chelsea site in 1997. Govan said other museums were vying to acquire one of the curving steel pieces, but Riggio said, “We have to have all three.” That’s how the Dia got its new chairman and the Serras were preserved in the Riggio Galleries at a new museum not dependent on corporate sponsorships or daily ticket sales.

“I still get tickled when we compare notes,” said Thompson, Govan’s former Williams College museum colleague. He stayed in Massachusetts to head Mass MOCA, which does depend on getting bodies through the turnstiles. Govan would not use such a measure at Dia:Beacon, Thompson said. “It’s not that he doesn’t know. His criteria are different. He’ll say, ‘Three really important writers came this month, or artist X came.”

In fact, 70,000 people visited last year, Govan said, more than he expected.

But although it’s a rarified institution, it’s also been a non-elitist neighbor, according to officials in Beacon, who credit the museum with spurring a revitalization of nearby Main Street, where many storefronts had been boarded up.

Mayor Clara Lou Gould praised a Dia program that sends artists into the local schools and gets the students, mostly working class, into the museum. Govan, himself the father of two girls, 11 and 1, said his goal was to reach the kids before someone taught them that art had to be in a frame or on a pedestal.

Govan also said that when LACMA representatives kept asking whether he’d be open to moving west, he invited them to Beacon -- after turning them down -- “because, honestly, I was hoping they’d get some ideas for their own place.”

Nancy Daly Riordan, who headed LACMA’s search team of 11 trustees, said they began with 50 names and, with consultant Malcolm MacKay, wound up talking with 26, many of whom turned down the job. Some also had spoken with trustee Eli Broad, who was looking for someone to head his museum within the museum, a $50-million building for contemporary art now under construction.

“The people we identified initially were more established, were older and had a lot of experience,” Riordan said. Some “would say to us, ‘You need somebody younger than me, somebody who’s going to go to sleep and wake up thinking about this.’ Michael Govan’s name arose at different times.”

Riordan discounted rumors that LACMA had been spurned by candidates in New York and Jerusalem, saying that account underestimated the subtlety of the dance among museum, headhunter and candidate. She said two candidates “ended up doing better in their museums,” a description that includes another Krens protege, Lisa Dennison, who in September was elevated from chief curator to director of the Guggenheim’s New York museum.

As for Govan, some on the committee worried that a candidate with such a contemporary focus might have trouble engaging fully with an encyclopedic museum like LACMA. But Riordan said that when she visited Dia:Beacon, Govan “knocked my socks off” by explaining De Maria’s “Equal Area Series,” 25 pairs of circles and squares, all formed by a stainless steel plate, their sizes gradually increasing.

In early November, Govan was in California for other reasons but attended a dinner with a few LACMA trustees. After that, he began doing homework on LACMA and its board. In December, he visited again and met curators too. By Christmas, he was in talks for the eventual five-year contract.

Govan said LACMA’s wooing included a call from the mayor and a tour of the Hancock Park house that comes with the job. LACMA has its exhibit schedule in place through 2010, but they assured him that “new ideas were possible.” He finally concluded, “It’s like a sleeping giant.”

That’s what the world’s leading sculptor said too. Serra got his fill of the Los Angeles museum a quarter of a century ago when he made three trips there so it could create a space for another of his large pieces, “Delineator.”

“The engineer there said it would slow down their production ... when they were building their new building, so they just canceled it,” Serra recalled.

Serra contrasted that with how Govan waited three years for his “Torqued Ellipses” to be manufactured and often discussed the history and nature of sculpture with him, more like an artist than a corporate museum director. “That museum’s been sleepy forever,” he said. “He’ll open it up.”

Govan said it was too soon to make detailed pledges, but he does have a wish list: He wants LACMA to build closer ties to younger local artists, such as Cuban-born sculptor Jorge Pardo, who in 2000 redesigned Dia’s ground floor in Chelsea. He may get the museum involved in the earthworks projects that he nursed from afar at Dia. “He will,” Thompson predicted. “It’s Western art. Some museum out there should own part of it.” Closer to home, Govan said, he’ll get artists in the schools, as at Beacon, and do other things to “bring the museum to people.”

He also wants to take the pressure off what it means to be an encyclopedic museum. “You can never be the Met,” he said. “You can’t go back and get those artworks. Even the Getty can’t.” He wants LACMA to be a must stop for the big touring shows, but he does not want it to be seduced by the entertainment model. “You can’t do it as well as the movies,” he said.

In a city where movie grosses are breakfast table reading, he no doubt will be reminded of how he is faring in the museum’s equivalent of the box office: attendance. But he said he would not buy into that game either.

“Can we measure the number of life-changing experiences?” he asked, sounding very much the young idealist on the day after the realization that this is what he was meant to do, run a museum. Of course, something else has occurred to him.

“Matisse became a painter at what, 42?”