Director to Focus on Filling Bowers Board

Peter C. Keller has temporarily relinquished his administrative duties as executive director of the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art to focus on shoring up the Santa Ana institution’s board, museum officials have said.

By June, 13 trustees will have left the 30-member board, which recently asked Keller to direct his energy toward filling the open slots.

Keller said he has delegated “almost every aspect of the day-to-day operations” to James Stathekis and Margaret K. Mooney, who oversee administration and finance, sales and marketing, respectively.

Keller could not say how long the reassignment would last. He said he has not stopped helping to land traveling exhibits for the museum.

“I can’t do it all,” Keller said Thursday, “and board development has got to be the highest priority the museum has for its future.”

Six Bowers trustees will be leaving the Bowers by May, when each will have served for seven years, the maximum allowed. Earlier this year, seven other trustees resigned, but none expressed dissatisfaction with the museum, said board chairman Lowell C. Martindale.

These departed board members said they were too busy or cited personal reasons, said Martindale, a senior partner at the O’Melveny & Myers Newport Beach law firm. Martindale said he has no plans to leave the board before his term expires in 2000.

“I try to have an exit interview with anybody who leaves the board to see if there’s some area in which we disappointed them or that we could improve on,” he said. “I’ve not gotten back any expression of dissatisfaction with the Bowers.”

Additionally, Martindale said, “I have not heard any discussion on the board of any desire not to renew [Keller’s] contract,” which expires in April. “I’d be shocked if there was any sympathy for not renewing it.”

Two former trustees contacted by The Times said they had chosen, for different reasons, to remain on other boards instead of on the Bowers’, but none interviewed criticized the 66-year-old museum or its management.

“I had absolutely no conflicts with anyone on that board or with Peter Keller,” said Arden Flamson, a leading philanthropist who volunteers for several Orange County groups and who recently left the Bowers board. “The Bowers is a wonderful place, and I think it does a huge service for Orange County. There’s [no other arts institution] like it.”

Trustees’ Responsibility

Cultivation of trustees, who typically donate large sums to subsidize nonprofit arts organizations, may be part of the job for a museum director, and some in Southern California have delegated certain administrative duties to focus on other areas, said Bolton Colburn, director of the Laguna Art Museum.

But Charles D. Martin, chairman of the Orange County Museum of Art, said that the responsibility for board development should rest “almost entirely” with sitting trustees.

Bowers trustees, who pay a minimum $3,500 annual fee to sit on the board, are participating in the search for new members, but Martindale admitted that their progress has lagged.

Part of the urgency, he said, stems from long-stalled plans to launch a major endowment campaign, which he had expected to announce six months ago.

The Bowers operates on about $3.5 million a year.

The pressure to increase the museum’s endowment, now at $350,000, is mounting because the city of Santa Ana began two years ago to reduce, by 10% a year, its $1.5-million annual subsidy to Bowers. But the board still lacks members who can afford the donations necessary to kick off a campaign, Martindale said.

“I don’t have people on the board prepared to make multimillion-dollar gifts,” he said, noting stiff competition for donations with such organizations as the Discovery Science Center, which will open a few blocks up Main Street next week. Its supporters raised roughly $24 million for the project. And the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa is due to launch a $100-million-plus capital campaign to add a new concert hall and other facilities.

“I wish I knew how to do it,” Martindale said.