Museum in Newport May Get New Chief

Michael Botwinick, 47, a former director of the Brooklyn Museum in New York and the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C., is expected to be named director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum tonight, The Times has learned.

The directorship, which has been vacant for 13 months, is especially crucial since the museum’s $50-million campaign to construct and endow a new building has been stalled since Kevin Consey left the post in November, 1989. Without staff leadership, the project has attracted only $10 million in cash and pledges.

Consey, who received $85,000 annually, left Newport Harbor to become director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

At least five others have been approached regarding the Newport Harbor directorship and have turned it down. Some cited reluctance to get involved in the building program.

The museum board will meet this evening to vote on Botwinick’s nomination by its search committee. Botwinick is expected to accept the position Friday morning.

A native New Yorker who now lives in Chicago, Botwinick directed the Brooklyn Museum from 1974 to 1982 and went on to the Corcoran Museum where he presided over a $10-million fund-raising campaign for the museum’s endowment and helped develop plans for a mixed-use office building to house museum classrooms and offices. He resigned in 1986 and is on the staff of the Fine Art Group, a Chicago consulting firm.

The Corcoran specializes in 19th-Century and contemporary American art. Newport Harbor concentrates on art from the post-World War II period.

Botwinick holds a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey and a master’s degree in medieval art from Columbia University in New York. He also has held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is known as an aggressive, hands-on director.