Former Museum Official Craig C. Black Dies

Craig C. Black, who directed the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County for 12 years, has died in Albuquerque, N.M., of complications following chemotherapy for lymphoma. He was 66.

A Harvard-trained paleontologist who came to Los Angeles from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Black was known as an innovative administrator who boosted donations and attendance at the 88-year-old Exposition Park museum. Black, who died Dec. 5, also oversaw the building of the Petersen Automotive Museum, part of the Natural History Museum’s holdings.

“He was responsible for putting the museum on the national and even the international map,” said James Lawrence Powell, who succeeded Black as director of the Natural History Museum. The last few years leading to Black’s 1994 retirement were stormy, however, as budget cuts and plans to shift the museum’s direction created divisions among longtime staffers. Critics of Black spurred an investigation of the museum’s finances, but Black was cleared of serious wrongdoing.

Black was born in Beijing, where his physician father taught pediatric medicine. A graduate of Amherst, he went on to receive a doctorate in biology from Harvard University in 1962. He began his museum career as an associate curator at Pittsburgh’s natural history museum in 1960 and in 1975 became its director.

When Black was lured to Los Angeles in 1982, attendance at the museum here had lagged so low that supporters called it “the best-kept secret in town.” Black quickly launched a drive to attract donors and urged staffers to apply for federal grants. He led an overhaul of museum management, merging its foundation trustees with the county-appointed board of governors. He traveled frequently to places like Kenya and China to participate in conferences and raise the museum’s profile.

“This museum was very much behind the times when Craig got here,” Janet Fireman, chief curator of history, said during Black’s turbulent last year as director. “He brought [the museum] up into the ‘80s standards from the sleepy state it had been in before.”

By the early 1990s, however, he was grappling with budget cuts, and layoffs loomed. Anxiety gripped the staff, many of whom had spent a lifetime at the museum developing highly specialized skills. Some began to question how the museum’s dwindling funds were spent, such as a $49,000 luxury sedan purchased by the museum foundation for Black’s use. The Board of Supervisors ordered county auditors to investigate.

In 1993, Black decided to remove two fragile skeletons--the huge camptosaurus and allosaurus that had dominated the museum’s foyer for years--to make way for a folk art exhibit. The relocation of the skeletons, beloved by many on the staff as unofficial mascots, to another room in the museum came to symbolize the internal battle over the future of the venerable institution. Black, like museum directors around the country, was struggling to find ways to do more with less, and acknowledged that the going was rough.

“It’s been a wonderful first eight years and a hellish last two,” he said in 1993.

Black is survived by his wife, anthropologist Mary Elizabeth King; a former wife, Constance Hockenberry Black of Pittsburgh; two children, Lorna Black Walsh and Christopher Arthur Black, and two grandchildren. A memorial service is planned in Albuquerque, where Black lived in retirement.