An Artful Turnaround : Museum’s Davies Had Own Agenda

The La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art is going through a renaissance. In five years, the tony seaside museum has tripled its attendance, eliminated a $500,000 debt, expanded its programs-- especially in sculpture and site-specific art--and opened a satellite gallery in downtown San Diego.

It has also earned a valued accreditation from the American

Assn. of Museums; produced national, award-winning exhibitions, as well as scholarly publications, and received the highest rating given arts institutions by the California Arts Council.

It’s been quite a turnaround. Just 5 1/2 years ago, the museum trustees fired their director for reasons that ranged from personality conflicts to questionable ethical practices.

Today, the museum stands at the most critical crossroads in its history. It has launched an $11-million fund-raising campaign to finance a major renovation planned by renowned architect Robert Venturi to double its limited (10,000 square feet) exhibition space.

The active ingredient behind the museum’s unprecedented growth is its director, Hugh M. Davies. The Princeton-educated Davies possesses a rare combination of casual ease, scholarship and managerial finesse that has captivated the museum’s staff, trustees and contributing artists alike.

Davies, 40, who became the museum director six months after Sebastian Adler’s dismissal, praises his predecessor and a previous generation of museum supporters and staff for building “an unbelievable collection of minimalist art and an international reputation for first-class exhibitions.”

“They established a reputation that has given us the freedom to experiment and expand the museum’s program,” he said.

At the same time, Davies has clearly had his own agenda for the museum, viewing it as less of a repository for artifacts than as a lab for the research and development of art. Similar to the way the La Jolla Playhouse plumbs the theatrical avant-garde, he has positioned his museum on the cutting edge of the visual arts.

With his casual style and easy manner, Davies seems to cast an odd shadow for a museum director.

“He’s got this deceptive . . . front,” said Texas artist Vernon Fisher. “He’s kind of laid-back. He’s got a tan. He plays golf. He makes it all look easy. I don’t know if he’s hiding behind that veneer, because he’s doing incredibly serious stuff.”

The Davies style belies a rigorous academic training that includes a Ph.D. in art history from Princeton. Under his guidance, the museum’s self-generated exhibits (80% of the museum’s shows are staff-organized) have consistently disdained safe themes for provocative ones.

But displaying the avant-garde in conservative San Diego, even when the art is screened, filtered and selected by a highly trained staff, is fraught with risks.

“Sometimes I worry that I’m so rarefied that I’m out of step with the person on the street,” Davies said. “But I’m not making a decision to please people on the street now. I hope the decisions we make today will be satisfying to the person on the street 50 years down the road.”

Davies’ colleagues around the country say he is definitely on the right track.

“He’s one of the bright young people in the new crop of directors,” said Martin Friedman, director of Minneapolis’ Walker Art Institute. Friedman gives Davies high marks for “particularly advanced exhibitions” and for taking chances that have extended the museum’s reputation beyond California.

Kevin Consey, the director of the competing Newport Harbor Art Museum, compares La Jolla with his own institution.

“It’s fair to say the total reputation of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art is easily in the top 10 contemporary art museums in the country,” Consey said. Consey credits that ranking to the excellence of exhibitions, programs, quality of staff and the quality of the collection.

The museums have similar rankings, seventh and eighth, despite being in conservative communities, Consey said. It’s a tossup as to which is in which place, he added.

Davies was born in South Africa and lived there until his father, a British church historian, moved the family to Oxford, England. They moved again when Davies was 8, this time to the United States.

He entered Princeton planning to study architecture, but shifted to art history and European civilization when he discovered that the architecture department’s focus in the late 1960s was urban planning. It was while Davies and other students were helping organize art exhibits that he discovered his aptitude and inclination for working with art, rather than studying it.

“He’s very talented, full of innovation,” said Sam Hunter, the Princeton art history professor who first exposed Davies to the business of exhibition. “I think he probably would have gone on and been an academic . . . but he turned into the direction of museum work. I think he picked the right direction.”

Davies says one of the most satisfying parts of his job is being able to help with the physical installation of shows.

“Whenever I can, I love to muck around with the artworks,” he said. “You never look at them the same as when you do that. There’s an intensity and concentration you don’t get. I would do more of it, but I don’t want to interfere with the curators. Installing a show is a personal thing.”

Like his predecessor, Davies seems to have won over most of the artists he’s worked with. Raul Guerrero, one of a growing number of San Diego artists whose works have been purchased by the museum, recalls an incident in which Davies looked at a series of four of his paintings, one of which was inspired by a Los Angeles bar frequented by artists.

“Hugh went to the bar to check it out, to see if I had captured a sense of the place,” Guerrero said. “It says a lot to me that he would make the effort, from someone who’s real busy. I’m sure he does it with other artists as well. It’s just his temperament.”

A key to Davies’ success is his interest in the artist’s creative process, according to artist Al Souza.

“When he presents an artist’s work, he really tries to present the work in a way the (artist wants) it presented, even if it means difficulties for him,” Souza said. “A lot of people try to change it. If you say, ‘It has to be this way,’ he’ll want to go in that direction.”

An example of the extent to which Davies will go to accommodate artists occurred during the planning stages for next month’s Vernon Fisher retrospective. After struggling in vain for years, the museum recently succeeded in discouraging the presence of sea gulls, which tended to mess up the facility, especially its large picture windows.

But Fisher needed sea gulls to appear in a camera obscura ocean-view projection. Out went a new directive to maintenance personnel: Bait the roof a month in advance in order to attract the pesky birds.

Museum Trustee Dr. Charles Cochrane said Davies was chosen for the director’s job because the museum wanted “someone who could manage the museum well and could relate well to the public.”

“He had the ability to help explain difficult art to people,” Cochrane said, “and he could certainly get along with people . . . who could eventually help in the development of the museum’s programs and financial base.”

Davies still has detractors. Although generally praising him for his presence at gallery openings, and the direction Davies has moved the museum, contemporary art collector Dr. Douglas Simay faults him for not promoting its satellite space in downtown’s emerging visual arts district.

“I think La Jolla is making progress under Hugh,” Simay said. “It’s just not fast enough for me. I never hear about openings downtown. There doesn’t seem to be an extra effort to say the La Jolla Museum is proud of downtown. There’s no signage per se. A tremendous number of people don’t even know where it is.”

Simay, who collects works of a number of Southern California artists, also found fault with the museum for not creating “a sense of excitement about its programs” and for not following up on its popular 1985 show of works by 42 San Diego artists.

Davies agrees with at least one of Simay’s criticisms.

“The accusation that the signage is bad (downtown) is absolutely correct,” Davies said. “We’re designing a banner to be put up.” However, he said the museum purposely adopted a low-key approach downtown.

“We don’t want to come downtown and say we are the final arbiters of everything that has to do with art.” A number of galleries paved the way, he said. “We are very much Johnny-come-latelies downtown and are very much aware of that.”

However, Davies bridles at the charge that the museum does not pay attention to Southern California artists.

“If anything, I think we may be accused of showing too much of our region last year and not taking enough of a national-international view,” he said.

He cited 1988 exhibitions in the museum of works by Los Angeles artists Douglas Heubler and Jud Fine.

“In terms of local artists, you can never be a prophet in your own land,” Davies said. “But, over the years, we’ve done exhibits by Faiya Fredman, Reesy Shaw and Italo Scanga. Last year we did the ‘Civilians’ show (a downtown group show featuring locals) and we just closed the (downtown) Tijuana show.”

Davies is planning an exchange exhibit of local artists with Boston’s Hayden Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 1990. The museum will invite local artists to submit slides of their work, which will be viewed by curators from Boston. The curators will then choose 20 or 30 artists, visit their galleries and pick six San Diego artists for exhibition.

La Jolla’s curators will pick six Boston artists for its exhibition.

“I think that kind of show will do more than anything I can conceive of to help local artists,” Davies said.

The greatest challenge facing Davies and the museum is the need to broaden its support to cover the expansion. Artistically, however, the biggest challenge may come during the two years of construction, beginning late next year, when the museum will be forced to move from the building.

Davies says he has no plans to shut down, and is looking for about 15,000 feet of space in downtown San Diego for a “temporary contemporary.”

“To me, it’s an incredible opportunity to be kicked out of our house and find a new way to live . . .” Davies said. “We’ll break out of the exhibit schedule. I really like the dice being rolled. There will probably be different programming. If you wanted to be safe, we would take shows from other institutions.”

The museum has applied for a special federal grant for a series of exhibitions, and there is talk of focusing on the international border.

“What if we rented space in Tijuana for an artist to come and live and create art in Tijuana?” Davies said. “Or we may get a Mexican artist to make art in San Diego to puncture that border.”

He ticked off the possibilities: a portable Bruce Nauman Spanish-English neon sculpture that could be exchanged with a Mexican institution. Or perhaps no exhibition per se, but instead a space divided into 10 rooms of 1,500 square feet each with an artist invited to create a work of art in each one.

The upcoming construction, the fund raising and the move into temporary quarters will make a test worthy of Davies’ skills, a task his many admirers say he’s up to.