Laguna Museum’s Former Director Hired in Ohio : Galleries: Charles Desmarais plans to focus on administration of the long-established Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

Charles Desmarais, former director of the Laguna Art Museum, has been hired as director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. He assumes his new position May 1.

The arts center made headlines in 1990 when director Dennis Barrie successfully led a legal battle over the right to show photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe that depicted sexual acts. Barrie left the center two years ago; he is now director of the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. Barrie’s successor, Elaine A. King, resigned in November, 1993, to pursue an academic career at Carnegie Mellon University.

Desmarais, 45, was fired by the Laguna Beach museum’s board in March, 1994, after a 5 1/2-year tenure during which he gave the 75-year-old provincial institution an artistic face lift with such exhibitions as “Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960-1980.” The board gave no reason for Desmarais’ dismissal.

Before coming to Orange County, he spent seven years as director of the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside. His previous positions include curator at the Friends of Photography in Carmel and director of the Columbia College Art Gallery in Chicago.

Founded in 1939, the Contemporary Arts Center is the second oldest institution in the United States--after the Museum of Modern Art in New York--dedicated to showing the work of living artists. The center has no permanent collection; it presents about 10 contemporary art exhibitions annually.

Desmarais, who was criticized privately by some Laguna Art Museum board members for devoting too much time to curating and not enough to administrative duties, said Tuesday that he plans to hire a curator for the center and limit his own curating to “a major show every couple of years.”

In an implicit rejoinder to his board critics at the Laguna Beach museum, he added, “I didn’t do any more than one major show every couple of years. I have always seen my job as being the director, having a hand in the full range of the museum’s needs and responsibilities.”

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The attraction of the Cincinnati arts center, Desmarais said, is its “history of being one of the most active institutions in contemporary art in the country. . . . I’m really proud that it’s a champion of democratic freedoms as a result of the 1990 stand it took for freedom of expression.

“And yet it’s a place that, since the Mapplethorpe controversy, has tried to (find a new direction), which they’ve done more and less well over the past few years. So there’s really something I can contribute to bringing focus to (their future).”

Spokeswoman Carolyn Krause, the center’s director of publications, said Desmarais was chosen by unanimous vote of the board and 10-member staff.

“Charles told us his heart was really in contemporary art,” Krause said. “He’s got a great track record with all the institutions he’s been associated with. He’s turned them around and made them grow. . . . This is a perfect time for (him) to get us on the map for something other than Mapplethorpe.”