New LACMA President: A Woman of Possibilities : Art: Andrea L. Rich says she was at UCLA to create an environment to make it easier for the faculty to do their jobs. ‘I imagine that I will play a similar role’ to help the museum do what museums do best, she says.

Two distinct responses greeted last week’s announcement by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that it had split its long-vacant top job in two and named UCLA administrator Andrea L. Rich to the newly created post of museum president.

“What?” exclaimed Rich’s longtime university colleagues when they read an announcement of her impending move on E-mail. How could the executive vice chancellor desert her educational and professional home of 34 years and move across town to an art museum?

Members of the art community, on the other hand, asked, “Who is Andrea Rich?” While she is revered on campus as UCLA’s second in command and highest-ranking supporter of the arts, she is little known in wider cultural circles. Artists, dealers, collectors, critics, curators--and even LACMA trustees who have not been involved in the museum’s ongoing search for a director--had few clues to her identity.

Furthermore, they questioned the wisdom of putting an administrator in charge of fund-raising and strategic planning while the yet-to-be-named director handles artistic affairs, especially when it became clear that the director will rank second.

Introduced at a press conference last week, Rich, who will start her new job on Nov. 1, exuded energy, good humor and warmth as she answered questions about her accomplishments at the university and her vision of the museum. Only once did she say UCLA when she meant LACMA, and no one seemed to notice the slip.

A few days later at the university, Rich still seemed unflappable, if bewildered by the sudden interest in every detail of her past. Welcoming a visitor into her office--brightened by posters from European art museums and a colorful transparent acrylic table designed by the artist and UCLA faculty member known as Vasa--she settled into a comfortable chair.

The only reactions to her appointment that have surprised her, she said, were those that focus on her being a woman. Rich knows how it feels to be the only woman on a university committee when issues concerning pregnancy and child care arise. What’s more, she faced a major obstacle 20-odd years ago in the form of “role expectations” that forced her to juggle the demands of a career, a husband and young children while her male counterparts concentrated on their jobs. But things have changed, or so she thought, and she was surprised to learn that she was being catapulted into a tiny cadre of women who have broken glass ceilings in art museums.

As for a revelation that she is not a member of the museum she will head, Rich said that was merely an oversight. Her former husband, television producer and director John Rich, took care of family memberships. She said that since their divorce 10 years ago, she has been a frequent visitor at the museum but let her membership lapse. “I don’t think they sent me a renewal notice,” she said, “but what can I say? I’m guilty. I’ll join. I will. I’ll make up for all sins past.”

A more serious question concerns the museum’s new administrative structure. “The board was terribly worried about that,” she said. “They want the museum to be a dynamic presence in the city and attractive to both the donors and participants. But they want artistic respectability too. It’s very hard to find in one person the ability to do strategic planning and really get things moving, and still be focused on the art program. I told them that there probably would be a backlash of some sort [to my appointment], but not to worry about it because once we got going, it would fall away.

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“I’m only here at the university to make the world a better place for the faculty to do what they have to do, and not to do what they do or tell them what to do,” Rich said. “I imagine that I will play a similar role there. That is, to create an environment where the museum can do what museums do best, which is acquiring, exhibiting and conserving art and doing scholarly work about it. I told the board that I wasn’t going to come in and be a chief curator. If that was what they needed, they were talking to the wrong person.”

Under the new structure, the director’s position will be “a terrific job, a plum job for somebody who has a deep passion for the core mission of the museum and wants to be obsessed with it,” Rich said. “That focus will be much easier to attain if that person doesn’t have to shoulder the full responsibility of fund-raising, administration and county relations. Those are time-consuming things and probably not the most attractive attributes of being a museum executive for someone who is an art professional. For someone like me who is a professional administrator, it’s fun. It’s appalling to people that I can enjoy that, but I really do.”

LACMA’s problem, as she sees it, is figuring out how to sustain the museum’s fundamental mission and still make it “a viable institution worthy of public support, both in terms of general membership and county support at a time when things are really in a crunch.” Just as the university must “create a cushion” of practical programs around its core mission of basic research, the museum must protect its art acquisitions, exhibitions and scholarship with programs that “provide an obvious answer to why the institution should be supported,” she said.

One way to do that is to engage “the full, diverse community” in multidisciplinary ventures involving partnerships with outside organizations and the use of new technologies, she said. “If LACMA is the region’s institution, then that’s the place where leadership can be exerted in terms of reaching out to new collaborative work throughout the city.” She’s thinking of offering UCLA Extension courses at the museum, taking an architecture program to the schools so that students better understand their environment and instituting challenge grants for multidisciplinary festivals, as she has done at UCLA.

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“That isn’t the core mission of the museum,” she said. “I know that, and it won’t replace its major mission. But it will, I think, build a very strong support base for the future. . . . We have to get the institution positioned in a way to be valued by the next generation and I don’t think we can assume that’s an automatic thing.”

New audiences can be attracted by partnerships with scholarly and community-oriented groups whose constituencies might not otherwise visit the museum, she said. Bridges can be built by addressing important themes that focus on different aspects of society and foster a sense of belonging.

As for new donors, the museum must “reach out to younger people to get them engaged at a fairly high level and create a flow of potential board members,” Rich said. “New generations of wealthy people are happening out there. You’ve got to make the museum a place where they want to be.”

Rich’s vision “electrified the board,” according to William A. Mingst, president of the museum’s board of trustees. But Rich is aware that her ideas don’t thrill those in the art community who fear that scholarly pursuits will be overshadowed by the concern for outreach.

“I’m afraid when I talk this way that some very narrow traditionalists feel that I’m talking about destroying the institution or ignoring the mission, but that’s not it at all,” she said. “I really think that’s one of the ways of saving it. We’ve got to build future audiences, future donors and future appreciators.”

Rich was born in 1943 in San Diego, a city that she said she could hardly wait to leave. “I always had a something for Los Angeles,” she said. “I don’t know where it came from, but even as a young kid, it just seemed to be the most exciting place I could imagine. Part of that must have been the glamour of the entertainment industry here. But it was also a sense of knowing you were somewhere when you were here and when you were where I was, you weren’t anywhere.”

The child of clothing store owners Leo and Ida Beck, Rich grew up in a comfortable environment where “nothing much ever seemed to happen.” In search of adventure, she and a girlfriend saved their money and departed on a two-month trip to Europe the day after they finished high school in 1961. “That was the beginning of my academic interests. The whole world opened up,” Rich said.

She considered heading east for college after reading what she says was the only book in her high school library about a woman--Madame Chiang Kai Shek, who attended Wellesley College. But Rich’s father dismissed the notion and urged her to go to UC Berkeley. Rich held out for UCLA, and eventually persuaded her parents that their dark-haired daughter wouldn’t evaporate into Sunset Boulevard or return as a platinum blonde. “My parents believed that Los Angeles was a morally decayed city,” she said.

Rich majored in theater during her first year at UCLA but switched to English and eventually settled on communications. “I was trained to be a high school teacher, but I spent two days at L.A. High as a student teacher and hated it,” she said. “I came running back to the campus to look for an application to join the Peace Corps.”

One of her former professors persuaded her to go to graduate school instead, with a four-year fellowship. Rich was married in 1966 and completed her doctorate in 1968, a few months after the birth of her first son, Anthony, now a television stage manager and writer. Her second son, Robert, a new technology entrepreneur, was born in 1970.

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She began her professional career at UCLA in 1968 as an assistant professor of communications studies and won the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1974, but her department was wiped out in a budget crisis so she did not get tenure. Switching to administration, first as assistant director of the Office of Learning Resources, she held seven other positions before taking over as executive vice chancellor in 1991.

Leaving Los Angeles wasn’t an option while she was married and “geography-bound,” she said. But neither was she seriously tempted to relocate because “just when I was getting bored, I would get another job here. It’s such a huge, complicated place that you can move in many different directions.”

Rich realized that she was approaching a turning point about two years ago, when recruiters began to pursue her. “Initially, because we were in the middle of a budget crisis, I felt very obliged to stay and get us through that,” she said. “But last year the pressure got higher and higher, and it just seemed the right thing to do.”

The most enticing possibilities were presidencies of schools she declines to name--”a small specialized college that would have provided a kind of pulpit on educational issues nationally” and “a big research university, just like this in another state.”

In the meantime, she was courted by LACMA--beginning early last fall by Catherine Lutge Sullivan of Korn Ferry, an executive search firm, and later by museum trustees. Initially the notion of moving to the museum seemed far-fetched, so Rich pursued the university presidency and was offered the job. But as LACMA’s proposal became more intriguing, Rich decided that she didn’t want to be a university president after all. Furthermore, she didn’t relish leaving the city that she believes is still full of opportunity, refreshingly free and hospitable to rebels, which is how she says she sees herself.

Rich credits her success to an experience in her 30s, when she was diagnosed with cancer and told she had two months to live. She had several surgeries and recovered after three years, with the diagnosis still in question.

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“Life just turned upside down,” she said. “What it means to be alive and how to live became so clear to me. I came out of that with a set of values and perspective that I never would have had, had I not had to face that. I know it sounds crazy, but it was just a wonderful experience.”

If nothing else, her close encounter with death has given her a high tolerance for criticism. Someone is always angry at UCLA, she said. If it isn’t the students, it’s the faculty or taxpayers or legislators. “You are attacked just because of the decisions you have to make, but I never take it personally.”

Life may not be much easier at the museum, but Rich said she’s “very excited about the possibilities of this new role. I really think that I’m motivated as much by a love of Los Angeles and a desire to see it work as anything else. And LACMA is clearly a player in that, or can be. I just hope that once we get going and have a director in place, the art world will find that I’m not a Philistine.”

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Resume: Andrea L. Rich

* Age: 52

* Education: bachelor’s degree from UCLA, 1965; master’s degree from UCLA, 1966; Ph.D., UCLA 1968

* Honors and awards: summa cum laude graduate, 1965; election to Phi Beta Kappa, 1965; Chancellor’s Teaching and Dissertation fellow, 1965-68; UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, 1974; Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Artes et Lettres, from the French government, 1991

* Professional positions, UCLA: assistant professor of communication studies, 1968; assistant director of Office of Learning Resources, 1976; acting director of Media Center, 1977; director of Office of Instructional Development, 1978-80; assistant vice chancellor of Office of Instructional Development, 1980-86; accreditation officer, 1983-90; assistant executive vice chancellor, 1986-87; vice chancellor for academic administration, 1987-1991; acting dean of School of Theater, Film and Television, 1990; executive vice chancellor, 1991-present

* Community affiliations: Trusteeship for the Advancement of Women; National Women’s Forum; Los Angeles Women’s Foundation Advisory Board; Venice Family Clinic board of directors; University of Judaism, board of visitors