Category: Museum Director
Nationality: American
Last Year: 21
A stormy year for Govan, beginning as he waded in with an unsuccessful merger offer for struggling MOCA. His own institution, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was also straining financially, and thunder descended when Govan scrapped the museum’s long-running weekend film programme. Protests began, letters from luminaries such as Martin Scorsese flew in, urging that film be treated as an art; the programme has been temporarily reinstated. Some canny deaccessoning has given way to collection-strengthening acquisitions, however, and a clement spell may lie ahead, with a new sparky contemporary art curator in the shape of the Menil Collection’s Franklin Sirmans, and an injection of cash from the Getty Foundation to consider postwar LA art.