Changing Picture at LACMA

Andrea L. Rich arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1995, riding a wave of hope and skepticism. The museum’s trustees had become frustrated with an unproductive search for a director who was up to the dual challenge of curing LACMA’s financial ills and spearheading its art programs. In a controversial move, they split the top position and gave supreme authority to Rich, a veteran administrator then serving as executive vice chancellor of UCLA.

Graham W.J. Beal, the former director of Omaha’s Joselyn Art Museum, agreed to join her in spring 1996 and moved to Los Angeles in September. As director--and, much to the art world’s horror, only second in command--he oversees the museum’s art collections, programs and staff.

The arrangement is unique: While the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a paid administrative president whose power is equal to the director’s, and several other museums have tried similar partnerships, LACMA is the only major art museum in the country in which the top position is held by an administrator. Doubts have been compounded by the fact that Rich’s background is in education, not art. Rich and Beal have been working together for the past year, yet art world observers remain dubious about the pairing, and some continue to predict its demise.

To date, most changes at LACMA have taken place behind the scenes. Apart from a dramatic shift in the museum’s hours of public operation and an announcement of a $3.7-million, privately funded initiative to bolster arts education in the public schools, effects of the new administration have been difficult to see.

What do Rich and Beal have to show for their efforts? Not a lineup of blockbusters for the coming year, though they have snagged “Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance,” an international traveling exhibition that opened in April at London’s Hayward Gallery; it will appear at LACMA next summer. Major exhibitions of Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese and pre-Columbian art are planned for 1999-2001. The lag time simply reflects intricacies of arranging loans of artworks and funding, museum curators and directors say.

“They are doing a reorganization that has to take time,” John Walsh, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, said. “If they get great exhibitions by the year 2000, they will be doing very well.”

So what’s been accomplished so far? Rich and Beal point to a slim plastic binder containing “LACMA and the 21st Century: A Strategic Framework for Planning,” a 15-page outline of the museum’s mission, goals and objectives; six organizational charts illustrating chains of command for the museum’s administration and staff and a 21-page proposal for the arts education initiative.

“This isn’t very glamorous,” Rich said repeatedly during a three-hour discussion at the museum, occasionally changing the adjective to “elegant,” “dramatic” or “sexy.” But she takes great pleasure--and not a little pride--in having the fruits of the new team’s labors documented in print. Reorganization, restructuring and re-budgeting is the news at LACMA, she said. If outsiders leaf through the book and conclude it is merely an ordinary example of any major museum’s basic plan, they simply don’t understand how LACMA operated before she and Beal arrived.

A diminutive, dark-haired administrator with a dynamic personality, Rich has a forceful, no-nonsense, prototypically American style. In sharp contrast, Beal is a tall, fair-haired art specialist whose polite reserve and elegant manner of speech reveal his British roots.

Together they have filled a leadership void at the Wilshire Boulevard institution, which derives about half its $30-million annual budget from the county and is known as the western states’ largest encyclopedic art museum. Following the departure of director Earl A. Powell, who presided over a 12-year period of growth but resigned in 1992 to direct the National Gallery of Art in Washington, LACMA suffered cutbacks in funding, programs and staff, and it weathered the abortive tenure of director Michael Shapiro, who left in 1993 after less than a year at the helm.

“When I came, there was such a pent-up need for action on a whole variety of fronts that I could have been quite overwhelmed,” Rich said. “Everybody wanted to do everything at once after that period of no leadership. Everyone wanted to jump in and raise money, but they didn’t even know what for; they hadn’t a clue. They wanted things fixed, but they didn’t even know what was broken.

“I had a set of steps that I had to go through. First, I had to get acquainted internally with what was going on with the curators, the administrative side, the budget, personnel and the board. Parallel to that, I began to search for a director and then to work with him to engage in serious planning and assessment. Then we had to translate those plans into physical manifestations and, finally, to think about fund-raising.”

The process has been “a kind of discipline to get people to stop for a moment and take stock,” she said. “My goal is to build an institution that will endure and have very strong foundations. The most difficult thing is to keep the big picture in mind and not be picked off every day by all the little things that torment life in an institution.”

Rich had hoped to find small but effective ways to “tweak the institution internally,” but that wasn’t the case. “When I got a sense of the inside, it turned out to be very much more complicated than I thought,” she said. “It’s fixable; it’s just that the traditions of administration were very old-fashioned. A lot of work had to be done to get people to think differently about how jobs are done and how one thing connects to the next, and to emphasize the larger goal.

“The structure had no relationship strategically to the mission of the place, which was art,” she said. “When I looked at the organization chart, I couldn’t even find the curators. There hadn’t been leadership out of the core of the place, so the bureaucracy had taken over. Looking at the offices, the way they were organized, the museum could have been the motor vehicles department.” On the new organizational charts, curators occupy a central position.

Every slot on the charts has been deliberated and every sentence in the strategic plan is the result of extensive collaboration, Rich said. But the crux of the matter, and a case in point, is the new mission statement:

“To serve the public through the collection, conservation, exhibition and interpretation of significant works of art from a broad range of cultures and historical periods, and through the translation of these collections into meaningful educational, aesthetic, intellectual and cultural experiences for the widest array of audiences.”

Dry and obvious as it may sound, the statement is revolutionary because it extends the museum’s responsibility, Rich said. “The old mission statement was to ‘collect, conserve and exhibit significant works of art,’ not for whom, why or how.” “To serve the public” was added at the beginning, but that was the easy part, she said. “It took about three months to come up with the word ‘translation’ and the rest was slogging because that’s a strong word. It means it’s the museum’s job to make artworks meaningful to this wide array of people, not the audience’s job to come already knowing everything.”

Hammering out the statement, word by word, was essential because it provided the key to artistic, educational, community, intellectual and audience goals laid out in the plan, Rich said. Once the mission and goals were clear, the staff was reorganized and resources were re-budgeted to conform to the new priorities.

“Re-budgeting is probably the singularly most difficult thing to do because you shove personnel around, you eliminate some personnel divisions and reallocate money,” Rich said. “In the past, you got what you got the year before, or a little more or less, depending on the economic situation. This was a complete reversal.”

The process has been traumatic. “There were a few nails being bitten,” Beal said. “But the openness of the system has provided more comfort for the staff than was there before.” The new budget also allows the museum to fill vacant curatorial positions. Specialists in textiles and costumes and American art are at the top of the list.

“The new fiscal year is going to be really interesting,” Beal said. “We’ve gone to a zero-based budget process from a zero sum game. There’s been an interesting notion here that as a curator with initiative, you got something whenever and however you could. If you could find a way to do it, you went after it and you did it. Moving from that kind of culture to one where everything is discussed openly and all the reasons for doing something or not doing something are discussed, and then planning to get it done is a big change.”

Putting the public first, as the mission statement does, has already brought some changes at LACMA. The museum is open on weekday evenings, so that working people can visit, and on Mondays to coordinate with three-day weekends, when families are looking for something to do, Rich said. When she noticed that the long hall leading from the staff entrance to offices was waxed every day while the public plaza was dirty, she decreased custodial time in the private section by 792 hours a month and increased time in the public area by 1783 hours a month.

LACMA’s push to be more accessible and to better serve the community is part of a nationwide trend that even includes the wealthy Getty Museum’s new facility in Brentwood, scheduled to open Dec. 16. But because of the county museum’s encyclopedic collection and public support, it should be in the forefront, Rich said.

As an example of the role the museum can play, she cited the arts education initiative, a privately funded collaborative effort spearheaded by LACMA that involves seven other local museums and four universities in beefing up arts education in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The new program, just beginning a two-year pilot phase, includes a teacher academy, internships, community workshops, an experimental gallery at LACMA’s May Co. facility and the Maya Mobile, a 48-foot trailer truck designed to replicate a Mayan ruin that will travel to sixth-grade classes.

Effects of emphasizing public service are beginning to be seen in new installations of the collection and explanatory material at the museum. But it’s only the beginning, Beal said. “We are planning a kind of signage and information system throughout the Ahmanson Building, so that when you walk through a gallery, you don’t have to look around and go to a tiny label. It will say on the wall, 16th century painting or something to that effect. On each floor there will be a small area with basic information and maps, a very straightforward way for the nonspecialist visitor to get sorted out.”

Many purists worry that the new approach stresses education at the expense of art, but Beal said he has no such qualms. “The thing I love about this as an ex-curator and ex-art historian is that the new generation of curators is in favor of this in the way that earlier generations were so purely concerned with connoisseurship and authenticity,” he said.

The change also reflects “the new art history,” which focuses on art’s context, he said. “It’s been really great for me to come here with some of those thoughts in mind and to get such a warm response from the curatorial staff, who are very eager to present objects that have different possibilities of approach and levels of understanding. It ranges from obvious things, like the ‘acoustiguide,’ where you just press a button, to installations that bring an object alive by talking about what it meant to the society that created it instead of just presenting it disembodied, like a trophy.”

Implementing the first part of a long-range plan to reorganize and reinstall the permanent collection, the curatorial staff has already completed a new, greatly expanded display of American art and furnishings on the Ahmanson Building’s plaza level. Areas devoted to Islamic and South and Southeast Asian art on upper floors also have been redesigned. A major expansion of the Far Eastern galleries is underway on the lower level.

Reflecting “economic imperatives” and a resolve to make the most of its own artistic resources, the museum will continue to emphasize the permanent collection, mounting masterpiece-in-focus exhibitions and modernizing displays, Beal said.

But plans also are in the works to strengthen the program of special exhibitions. “When I arrived here last year, it was four or so years since Rusty Powell had been gone, so the lack of an artistic leader was really felt. There hasn’t been the kind of pizazz woven through the exhibition program that you really need. We have absolutely first-class exhibitions coming up; the intellectual and artistic integrity of our program is complete, but it doesn’t have that element that we have educated our public to think it has to have. We are working on that. I hope by the year 2000 we will really be back,” he said.

Although membership has remained steady at 65,000 and annual attendance is holding at about 600,000, those figures are lower than they should be, Beal said. A more compelling slate of temporary exhibitions isn’t the only answer, but it would help. To that end, “Pharaohs of the Sun,” a big Egyptian show organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to illuminate the art of Akhaenaten’s reign during the 14th century BC, is coming to LACMA in spring 2000.

An exhibition of pre-Columbian ceramics from West Mexico, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, is scheduled for 1999; two years later, LACMA will complete the picture with a similar show of East Mexican material organized by Virginia Fields. Among other major projects being fashioned by curators at the county museum are Keith Wilson’s Chinese landscape painting show, “A Sense of Place” (2000-01); Sharon Takeda’s exhibition of Japanese Noh costumes (2002); and “Made in California,” a collaborative, 100-year survey that will fill much of the museum with California-related material (2000-01).

For better or worse, LACMA is closely watched because of its size, public support, central location and the breadth of its collections. “The rest of us play interesting roles in specialized ways, but center stage is still there,” the Getty’s Walsh said.

However, the museum’s leadership structure continues to raise questions. “That will never work,” art critic Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe said in a recent interview. “It’s only a matter of time” until the situation self-destructs, he contends.

Yet taking stock of their accomplishments, Rich and Beal said they are encouraged, but they have only begun to transform the museum into the robust, exciting and important place it should be.

As for facilities, an appliance store and a filling station on the May Co. property have been demolished and replaced with lawns. The first floor of the building will be used for the children’s experimental gallery, a bookstore and other retail space. The basement and most of the upper floors will be used for storage and conservation. The top floor may be developed as a banquet and conference space. Window spaces will feature a series of installations of contemporary art that can be viewed from passing cars.

These are all temporary measures. “Right now we are looking at things that don’t require tearing down the building, just fixing it up,” Rich said. Until the museum can afford to develop the property, “we want to make vital and programmatic use of the building, restore the outside, be proud of it, use it as a way to communicate about ourselves, through banners and things of that sort,” she said.

On other fronts, Rich and Beal are actively recruiting new board members to bring in younger people and corporate leaders. Most of the old guard is gone. “You know, Ed Carter, Franklin Murphy, Dick Sherwood; they were giants who could pick up the phone. They were LACMA’s protectors,” Rich said. “Now we have to rethink the momentum. This is an institution that really needs to be critical. We have to worry about succession and connections.”

And yes, there will be a major capital campaign, Rich said, but she declined to provide details. Sources close to the museum say it will begin in 2000 and the goal will be $300 million, with half of that sum coming from the trustees.

“I usually swim against the flow,” she said, “but I feel very strongly that an institution should have its goals carefully established and have its structure in place, and be efficient so it can assure donors that every dollar contributed is going to the program. We are in the process of analyzing our needs and talking to lots of supporters about what they would like to happen. The campaign is a few years off, not because we don’t need money, but because we really want to do it right.”

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* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon to 8 p.m.; Fridays, noon to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Adults, $6; senior citizens and students, $4; ages 6-17, $1; under 5, free. Also: free the second Tuesday of each month.