L.A. County Museum Losing Ninth Curator in Two Years : Art: Edward F. Maeder is leaving the problem-plagued facility to direct a shoe museum in Toronto.

Edward F. Maeder, curator of costumes and textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art since 1979, has resigned to become founding director of the planned Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. He is the ninth curator to leave the beleaguered museum during the last two years.

Beginning April 1, Maeder will direct the world’s largest international shoe collection, composed of 9,000 pairs of shoes including extensive holdings of Native American, Inuit, Lapp and Siberian footwear.

The collection has been built over the past 30 years by Sonia Bata, a member of a leading shoe manufacturing family that founded its business 100 years ago in Czechoslovakia and relocated in Canada during the 1940s. The collection will be displayed in a six-story, 37,000-square-foot building, which is expected to open in the spring of 1995, Maeder said.

An energetic curator who was educated at the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art and views his field as a microcosm of art history, Maeder has organized 36 exhibitions for LACMA and has doubled the size of its costumes and textiles collections--from 30,000 to 60,000 objects.

Maeder said he resigned to seize an opportunity, but that the museum’s problems made his decision easier. “It’s not every day you get a chance to be the first director of a brand-new museum,” Maeder said. “I couldn’t go to another costume department because there’s no place as good as LACMA. The only thing I could do was change direction.”

His position will be filled when LACMA has a new director, according to press officer Jessica O’Dwyer. Meanwhile, a tribute to Maeder in the form of an exhibition, “In Celebration: Fifteen Years of Collecting Costumes and Textiles (1979-1993),” is scheduled for March 31-July 17, 1994.