Museum Hires Firm to Help Find Director

The Newport Harbor Art Museum has hired an international search firm to help find a replacement for director Kevin Consey, who left in November to become director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Korn-Ferry International--the same firm that the Chicago museum employed to find Consey--was hired in the wake of James Demetrion’s decision several weeks ago to turn down the Newport directorship. The terms of the museum’s offer to Demetrion, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., have not been disclosed.

Korn-Ferry representatives in Los Angeles would not discuss details of the Newport Harbor search and would not estimate how long it will take.

Demetrion said he decided against coming to Newport Harbor because he was “very reluctant to get into a big building program.” The museum is in the middle of a $50-million drive to endow and finance construction of a new building at East Coast Highway and MacArthur Boulevard. A 1993 opening is planned.

Korn-Ferry recruitments in the art world include Peter Marzio, director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Jack Lane, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Jacqueline Baas, director of the University Art Museum in Berkeley.