After 6 Months, Shapiro Assesses LACMA’s Future : Art: County Museum director has faced a host of budgetary challenges, staff defections and criticism of his management, but he remains optimistic.

Six months into his new job as director of the beleaguered L.A. County Museum of Art, Michael Shapiro has weathered a host of challenges. Arriving in Los Angeles last October, the former chief curator of the St. Louis Art Museum was rudely greeted by a financial crisis. A countywide budget squeeze cut $2 million from the museum’s budget, forcing reductions of staff and operations. Memberships and donations also dropped off, leading to a decrease in private funding and additional layoffs.

As fear gripped the museum and morale plummeted, exhibitions were canceled, several key curators accepted better positions elsewhere, and--due to the elimination of a job classification--three senior curators were bumped to lower levels. One of those three, Maurice Tuchman, filed suit against Shapiro and the Museum Associates, LACMA’s private support group, after being unwillingly transferred from his longtime post as senior curator of 20th-Century art to a newly created department of 20th-Century drawings. Tuchman has sued for reinstatement to his former position and for damages.

Amid all the disruption, Shapiro, who moved from a $52,000-a-year position in St. Louis to a $175,000-a-year job at LACMA, has purchased a $1.5-million house in Westwood, with a loan from the Museum Associates. (The group made a similar arrangement with the previous director, Earl A. (Rusty) Powell III, to help with the purchase of a house in Hancock Park that was frequently used for museum entertaining.)

But though the new director is settling in, would he have come to LACMA if he had known he would get into such a can of worms? Shapiro falls silent, then sidesteps the question by saying, “Maybe I was naive.”

Shapiro inherited the county’s fiscal crisis, along with Southern California’s sagging economy, but the museum’s mounting problems have focused a strong light on his fledgling administration and attracted sharp criticism of his leadership ability.

“There’s no question that he has a difficult job, or that he could not have come at a worse time,” said one staff member who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But Michael Shapiro has not provided direction. The museum is without direction of any kind.”

“He talks a good game, but all he has done is terrorize everybody,” said another longtime staffer who likens Shapiro to a high school principal who gives pep talks about teamwork but behaves autocratically.

“When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a mean and nasty person,” Shapiro said, in an interview in his office. “I don’t see a monster,” he said, stretching out a few strands of his curly dark hair as if to construct an image of himself that he believes is completely unfair.

Neither does he view the museum’s problems to be as serious as they may appear. “If you look at a broad picture of the museum, the picture is good,” Shapiro said. “We have about 300 staff members. All of our curatorial departments are active. We have a full exhibition schedule. This museum became the premier West Coast exhibition venue during the ‘80s. It remains that and will remain that in the future.

“I consider our health to be good and I think the future is bright for us,” he said. “Museums are a reflection of the cultures in which they reside; whatever challenges we face, they are not unique to ourselves but reflective of a set of national issues that even the best-endowed American museums are facing.”

The first on a short list of the director’s immediate goals is the development of a sculpture park on the museum grounds, a $5-million project funded by a county bond issue. “The museum park can be a destination,” Shapiro said. “The message from the museum is that art can be part of people’s lives and they don’t have to pay for it.”

The second is to purchase the May Co. property adjacent to the museum and develop the 280,000 square feet of space in the defunct department store for exhibitions and storage. Third is the renovation of the Ahmanson building.

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Shapiro’s troubles may stem from the fact that prior to coming to LACMA, he was a curator with little administrative experience instead of a seasoned director like Powell, who left LACMA to direct the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Many staff members, some of whom had helped compile a list of candidates for the directorship, felt betrayed by the appointment of a little-known colleague who was not on the list and was less prominent than some of LACMA’s own scholars.

Suspicion deepened last fall when Shapiro brought in a psychological testing firm to administer tests on the staff. While some staffers thought the process was “insulting” or a “silly waste of time,” others claim that test results are being used to categorize and to humiliate them in meetings.

Shapiro denies this. “I don’t even know the scores,” he said. “This (kind of testing) is what’s happening in the private sector. It’s not a shocking thing. It’s just a vehicle for getting people to talk. If you realize you are an introvert and your colleague is an extrovert, that might help you understand each other and communicate better.”

He instigated the process because he had taken a similar test several years ago at a course on professional leadership at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C. “It was a terrific experience,” Shapiro said.

“I thought it would be a good way to open up lines of communication, and some people have commented that they thought it was a breath of fresh air. I don’t want to criticize the past . . . but people have been in little boxes here. Sometimes that is nice, because the boxes are comfortable, but that doesn’t lead to an open, dynamic museum,” he said.

Shapiro characterizes his management style as having three key elements: team-building, communication and innovation. In addition, he emphasizes “goal-setting as a means to institute those characteristics.” What he has accomplished so far, he said, is to lay the groundwork for better communication within the museum and between the museum and other arts institutions and the larger community.

As to the museum’s dwindling staff, a successor to Philip Conisbee, curator of European painting and sculpture, is likely to be named by September, when Conisbee becomes curator of French paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Shapiro said. Other curatorial openings will be filled over time, Shapiro said, and he expects to add a curator of Latin American art.

The recent appointment of Christopher Ponce, former head of Stanford’s Southern California office, as director of development is the only major vacancy that Shapiro has filled.

His top hiring priority is a director of education to lead a department that Shapiro hopes to build as a major part of the museum’s program. “I am looking for a person who can work effectively with curators and the community in a wide-ranging program,” he said. A storage space in the museum soon will be converted to a model classroom, he said, and an education center eventually will be built, most likely in the Ahmanson building.

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Shapiro plans to maintain the present roster of curatorial departments, but curators will be asked to engage in collaborative programs. “We have begun the process of internal discussion, which I think will lead to an enhanced program for the museum,” he said. One result is the formation of interdepartmental task forces that will explore broad territories, such as the 20th Century (including painting and sculpture, photography, prints and drawings, costumes and textiles, decorative arts and design) and the Pacific Basin (including art from Asia and the Americas).

“From my perspective, there is one collection,” Shapiro said, noting that he wants to break down “psychological barriers” between the museum’s specialists. To illustrate his approach, he points to the reinstallation of the contemporary art galleries that now include photographic pieces. Another example is the current exhibition of John Pfahl’s photography. “I believe this is the first photography show that has been in the Anderson building (which generally houses modern and contemporary art). My question is, why not? Boundaries should be changeable and flexible.”

But photography is such a staple of the contemporary art scene that few are likely to question its presence in the Anderson building. Many members of the art community are concerned about reports of canceled exhibitions and changes in the program, however.

“Exhibitions go on and off schedules all the time, at all museums,” Shapiro said. He says that LACMA may have had too many exhibitions in the past, but he has not determined an ideal number. The schedule for the coming year conforms to the recent annual average of 20 to 25 exhibitions. “The downside of exhibitions is that they detract from the permanent collection, and divert resources that might be used (more productively),” he said.

Eight exhibitions have been deleted from the schedule during Shapiro’s tenure, and six have been added, mostly drawn from the permanent collection. “Max Weber: The Cubist Decade, 1910-1920” was dropped when the current show of the Maurice Wertheim collection of Impressionist art was added, because there wasn’t space to accommodate both exhibitions. Others were eliminated from the schedule because they weren’t funded, he said. An exhibition of works by painter R.B. Kitaj was dropped, but it is likely to be reinstated because a possible donor has emerged.

As to the future, Shapiro said the museum will do market research to find out who its audience is and what kind of experience visitors want at the museum. Changes are likely to include everything from the installation of more seating to a consistent form of labeling artworks. “We need to look into the ideal gallery arrangement, signage, the possibility of staging performances on the plaza and how to make the entrance more friendly, maybe with banners,” he said.

Because Shapiro often points to the museum’s role as an educational institution and to exhibitions and programs that might attract broader ethnic audiences, some critics have accused him of turning the museum into a community center, he said, but he bristled at the notion and uttered an expletive.

“While it is important to have exhibitions that reach out into the community and address the diversity of art, we also have to serve the Westside audience,” he said. The museum is negotiating for “a major Impressionist exhibition,” a traditional subject that brings in crowds and “makes people feel good,” he said. “We will continue to show major exhibitions of European and American art. We are a place for all the people. I can’t help thinking that’s what our identity will be. Art can be an inclusive activity as we try to reach new audiences and preserve our established audience.”

Meanwhile, controversy about the museum’s future continues. “No one disputes that the museum needs to address multicultural issues in its programs,” said one staff member. “But if Michael Shapiro is going to lead the museum in a new direction, he needs to have the staff behind him. As it stands, he doesn’t have that. He talks about teamwork, but he himself is not a team player. He is very cold.”

The Revolving Door at LACMA

Here are key personnel changes during Michael Shapiro’s six months as director of the L.A. County Museum of Art.

DEPARTURES

* Philip Conisbee, curator of European painting and sculpture, will depart in September to become curator of French painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

* Thomas W. Lentz, curator of ancient and Islamic art, left in November to become assistant director for research and collections at the Arthur T. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington.

* Michael Quick, curator of American art, will take early retirement in May to pursue independent research in Los Angeles.

* Sheryl Conkelton, associate curator of photography, will depart in June to take a similar position at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

* Judi Freeman, associate curator of 20th-Century art, will leave in June to become Joan Whitney Payson curator at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.

* Sandy Fox, associate curator of textiles and costumes, was laid off in March as part of an effort to reduce the museum’s payroll.

ARRIVAL:

* Christopher Ponce, director of development