New blood from N.Y.: Will it help?

The Orange County Museum of Art on Monday announced that Dennis Szakacs, who has spent the last seven years as an executive at contemporary arts institutions in New York City, will be its new director.

A double whammy hit the Newport Beach-based museum during its last fiscal year with the illness and death of its previous director, Naomi Vine, and the poor economy, which threw the museum’s budget into deficit for the first time since its 1996 reconfiguration from its previous identity as the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

Even before that, the museum had been confronted with vacancies on its curatorial staff.

Szakacs, 40, begins his job on April 1. Since 1996, he has been deputy director of Manhattan’s New Museum of Contemporary Art. Before that he spent nine months as managing director of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, an affiliate of New York’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Speaking Monday from his office at the New Museum, Szakacs (pronounced SAKE-us) said the new job gives him the chance to fulfill his ambition to “run my own shop.”

He also was drawn by the chance to head a museum in Southern California.

“Culturally it’s an extraordinarily interesting place. One could make a compelling argument that art in Southern California over the last 10 to 15 years has been the most important art produced in this country,” he said.

The Orange County museum’s curatorial staff, donor base and potentially large metropolitan audience “give you the three things you need to build a fabulous museum, and there aren’t many places in the country where those three things come together,” Szakacs said.

Darrel D. Anderson, the museum’s chairman of the board, said Szakacs’ experience as a fund-raiser who helped plan renovation and expansion projects at both P.S. 1 and the New Museum fits his institution’s long-range needs.

Anderson said he expects Szakacs to be a point man who can generate excitement about the museum, known for its permanent collection of California art and wider-ranging exhibitions of contemporary work.

“I’ve gotta tell you, last year was no fun,” Anderson said. In Szakacs, he thinks the museum has found a leader who can cement a sense of stability, then bring ambitious growth plans to fruition, among them the museum’s eventual multimillion-dollar expansion and relocation, possibly to a site reserved for it next to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Szakacs takes over leadership of a museum that ran a $180,000 deficit in fiscal 2001-02, when it spent $2.9 million. But Anderson said that things have improved, and the museum expects to be “in pretty good shape” when its current fiscal year closes in March.

“He has an infectious enthusiasm for what he does that I found absolutely charming,” Anderson said.

“What captured me more than anything was the enthusiasm and the passion with which he engages the subject of art, art history, the business of art and the world of museums.”

Szakacs fell for art as a young boy visiting museums in Cleveland. Although English and political theory were his focus at the University of North Carolina, he hung out with an arts crowd.

“All my art friends were complaining about the dearth of good criticism. I thought maybe I could change that.”

He became a critic for a weekly paper, then ran his own journal, Artview, from 1987 until the early ‘90s.

He moved into museum administration, first at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., and then at the Jewish Museum in New York City, where he was in charge of program fund-raising.

Szakacs will move to Orange County with his wife, Maria, and their sons, ages 2 and 6.

“He has superb leadership abilities, and he is unusual in bringing a love and understanding of art, combined with other skills,” said Lisa Phillips, the New Museum director who has been Szakacs’ boss for the last 3 1/2 years.

Among his key accomplishments, she said, has been helping to plan an ongoing relocation and expansion project that will double the museum’s space.

With the new director’s arrival, Elizabeth Armstrong, the chief curator who had filled in as acting director, will go back to her former job, bolstering the planning and presentation of new shows.

Armstrong, who arrived in April 2001, said the administrative duties she took over during Vine’s struggle with cancer and after her death in December 2001 had slowed her in pulling together her first large show at the museum, “Girls’ Night Out,” a presentation of young international women artists whose subject is women, due to open in September.

“I learned a lot as acting director,” she said, “but I’m really happy as a curator.”