Champion of the Overlooked

Elsa Longhauser has arrived in Southern California on a wave of hope that she will transform the Santa Monica Museum of Art from an underfunded, low-profile exhibition space to a thriving destination of choice, both for the local community and the international art world.

Longhauser took on a big challenge when she agreed to become the museum’s new director, and she knows it. “We have a lot of work to do in terms of building a team, raising money and gathering an audience,” she said. “But I believe that everything starts with programming. If you have exciting and dynamic programming, people want to be a part of it, and you hope to get the support you need to underwrite it.”

Fresh from Philadelphia, where she directed the galleries of Moore College of Art and Design for the past 17 years--a job that entailed developing an innovative program, raising funds for two galleries and establishing a $1-million endowment--Longhauser assumed her new position last Thursday. She succeeded Thomas Rhoads, who ended his 12-year tenure in January to become manager of administration at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

A few days before Longhauser officially took charge of the museum at Bergamot Station, she turned up for an interview, bright-eyed and artfully garbed in a long black dress and yellow-green velvet stole, with a strip of green fabric twisted around the crown of her head. Having been abruptly transplanted from her longtime home in a historic bastion of East Coast culture to a West Coast arts center in a recently converted industrial zone, she resembled an exotic bird who had flown into unfamiliar territory and didn’t know quite what to make of it.

But in life--as in art--appearances can be deceiving. Fragile as Longhauser may look and soft-spoken as she may be, she’s a seasoned curator and arts administrator who inspires confidence with her quiet determination and--more important--her track record.

Cecilia Dan, who heads the museum’s board of trustees and played an active role in the search for a new director, said Longhauser is an ideal leader for the 15-year-old institution. “When our search began, we knew we needed an administrator and fund-raiser, but someone who was also an artistic visionary,” she said. The “artistic visionary” part of the equation seemed increasingly important as members of the search committee sifted through a field of 50 candidates, but it was essential to get “the perfect balance,” she said. “Elsa really fit the bill for us.”

Longhauser’s peers in Los Angeles seem to agree.

“She’s a very good choice,” said Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “She has a very consistent history of organizing exhibitions that are surprising, original and quite the opposite of trendy, which I think is wonderful.” Citing as examples shows of works by Swiss psychotic outsider artist Adolf Wolfli, San Francisco performance artist Terry Fox and Austrian feminist Valie Export, Schimmel said Longhauser doesn’t go by the book. Instead, she focuses on artists who are overlooked, misunderstood or underappreciated, he said.

Ann Philbin, director of the UCLA Hammer Museum, also praised Longhauser’s accomplishments: “I have always admired Elsa’s shows at Moore College. She has a very adventurous and a very rigorous eye, so I am absolutely thrilled about her coming here. It just adds to the concentration of talent in Los Angeles.”

Longhauser portrays her professional development as a “slowly evolving career vision.” Born and raised in Philadelphia, she entered Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, as a psychology major. While working at Philadelphia Psychiatric Center during the summer after her freshman year, she met Norman Weiner, a young resident physician. A romance developed, so she transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, and they were married at the end of her sophomore year.

She had three children--daughter Tracey and sons Jonathan and Joshua--by the time she was 24, but she continued her college education part time during the 1960s and early 1970s, switching her major to English and then to art history. The latter change was inspired by artist friends who took her to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and “explained the way art was constructed and how to look at the visual universe,” she said. “It had such a profound effect on my life that I thought this is something I really want to do in a professional capacity.”

Longhauser finally earned her bachelor of arts degree in 1971 and proceeded to take graduate courses in art history. But the death of her husband, in 1977, forced her into the job market--at age 36.

“I had studied art history over a long period of time while being a mother, so I knew what I wanted to do,” she said. “Understanding how to look at art was not taught at school, so only those people who were given access or had acquired it naturally, through their own gifts, knew how to look at the visual world. I decided to use my art history background to raise people’s awareness of the visual universe and to use art to enhance the life of the mind and the spirit.”

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In her first position, as director of the Eric Makler Gallery in Philadelphia, she had free rein to develop an adventurous program. She brought in a group of young local artists, pursued her personal interest in folk art, and organized a series of lectures and other public programs “to bring the community in and get people talking to each other,” she said.

That job led to a two-year appointment, from 1979 to 1981, as gallery director at the Philadelphia College of Art (now part of the University of the Arts). During that period, she worked with the Museum of American Folk Art in New York to organize “Transmitters,” a groundbreaking exhibition of works by self-taught artists that traveled to five museums.

“I was interested in not just organizing exhibitions, but putting them in a context that would make the work accessible to the public,” Longhauser said. That meant providing “extensive user-friendly wall text and brochures and handouts,” catalogs with a variety of voices and programs that reach a variety of audiences.

“I don’t care if people don’t like what I do,” she said. “My hope is to give them something to take with them and think about, something that will enhance their visual perceptions or their vocabulary of visual experience.”

In 1982, when her children were grown, Longhauser moved to New York to direct the Max Protetch Gallery. “Max was showing all the major architects--Michael Graves, Rem Koolhaas, Denise Scott Brown, Philip Johnson, Aldo Rossi--and artists including Scott Burton, Pat Steir and Siah Armajani. Curators from all over the world, artists, collectors and museum professionals came through the gallery. It was really extraordinary, and I loved it,” she said.

But at the end of 1983 she moved back to Philadelphia to marry William Longhauser, a graphic designer and professor at the University of Philadelphia. Starting over again, she became gallery director at Moore College.

“Moore is in the center of the cultural part of Philadelphia, so I had to develop a mission that would not repeat the work that was being done in the surrounding art institutions,” she said. “We came up with a mission which was to show the work of artists who are important but not known. We decided to select work that was not yet necessarily certified but seemed to have some kind of resonance and importance and was actually going to factor itself into the history of art.”

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When she arrived at Moore, the gallery was nothing more than a lobby. The college needed both a proper place to exhibit the work of local artists and to present an international program, she said, so she began to raise funds for two galleries. A gift of $100,000 from CBS founder William Paley paid for the renovation of the lobby as a showplace for the international program. Paley’s niece and nephew, Robert P. and Rochelle F. Levy, provided major funding for an adjacent gallery for art from Philadelphia. The Levys and a foundation established by Paley gave the college $1 million for a program endowment. Among other things, the endowment funded the Moore International Discovery Series, a biannual exhibition of works by influential but little-known artists from other countries, selected by an international panel of distinguished curators.

In her new job in Santa Monica, Longhauser will attempt to increase the museum’s annual operating budget from $700,000 to $1.5 million during her first three years. The museum is funded by a mixture of public and private sources, including $15,000 from the Getty Grant Program to assess the museum’s program and draft a strategic plan to solve problems.

Longhauser also will continue to function as a consciousness raiser and a “seismograph” who helps people understand “things that are bubbling up in the art world and selects ideas and issues that really have some importance,” she said. What attracted her is that “it’s a small museum with a very dynamic mission to show the work of artists who haven’t necessarily reached the stage of certification or who aren’t necessarily on the screen yet, but will soon be.” The museum is “an experimental laboratory for looking at this kind of work, with an emphasis on showing it for the people in the region but also contextualizing it within an international framework.”

Affirming her colleagues’ assessment of her, Longhauser said she is “very interested in original thinking and in looking at the world from this side or that side or the top or the bottom, but not necessarily straight on. At this point in time, we have access to everything. We are in the center of a huge information input. We have to find ways to focus people’s attention on what we think is meaningful and do it in a way that is interesting, exciting and differentiates us from the galleries around us,” she said.

Among possibilities she envisions are experimental film and video, programs that allow children and adults to show their collections, and a series of visiting curatorships, she said. “I would like the museum to be a place where every artist and arts professional wants to come because they will see things that they won’t see anywhere else. I want to make it a place where the community feels comfortable, where they walk in and are immediately given enough information so they can understand what’s on view.”

Pulling up roots wasn’t easy for Longhauser or her husband, who gave up a tenured university position and is moving his graphic arts business to Los Angeles. But accepting the museum’s offer was not a tough decision, she said. “Los Angeles is a very vibrant and fascinating city, completely different from everything I am used to on the East Coast. But one doesn’t often get the opportunity to make a dramatic change into something that is different but equally exciting, if not more so.”