Heading to Los Angeles straight from creating Dia's museum in Beacon, New York, Michael Govan didn't know what he was getting into. "I remember the mayor called me," he says. "He was talking about needing leadership for L.A. and culture, and I said, 'That's really ridiculous. I'm a museum director, I organize the collections in the buildings, provide services to the public. I think that's enough.' " But in the case of his job as CEO and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which he took last year, he's responsible for about a quarter-million square feet of exhibition space, a vast permanent collection that includes the largest gathering of pre-Columbian art in America, and a still-rising new wing by Renzo Piano. In the meantime, the 44-year-old has questioned why L.A.'s cultural resurgence isn't moving faster, has shamed local donors for giving collections to New York museums ("It's like coal to Newcastle!"), and has transformed LACMA from something as fossilized as the residents of the nearby La Brea Tar Pits into a major destination.
In the same way that Govan turned Dia:Beacon, with its quixotic devotion to difficult and ungainly art, into a crowd-pleasing celebration, he's building a home for a view of the world through West Coast eyes. He shuffled LACMA's collection and turned the keys to a Magritte show over to John Baldessari, who proceeded to paper the ceiling with photos of a freeway cloverleaf and create a monster attendance hit. Next he put into motion a plan that would give Hancock Park a badly needed landmark: a towering sculpture by Jeff Koons of a locomotive, which will dangle from a crane. The museum recently staged the most ambitious exhibition of Latin American art ever shown in the United States.
Govan—who now lives a few blocks away from the museum with his wife, Katherine Ross, an LVMH executive, and their two-year-old daughter—grew up in Washington, D.C., but his feeling for California art came from a year he spent at UC San Diego. He got his start running the Williams College Museum, and then served as Deputy Director of the Guggenheim before landing at Dia. The experience of managing Dia's far-flung satellites (like Walter De Maria's Lightning Field in New Mexico) fueled his most ambitious plan yet: a scheme to take in L.A.'s endangered modernist houses as museum pieces. "The architectural revolution here was domestic," Govan says, "and it's generally not accessible to the public." His plan is to acquire Wrights and Neutras and Schindlers and have curators live in them, to help maintain and show them and to "keep the ideas alive," as he puts it. Govan gets even more audacious: "I've jokingly talked to Frank Gehry about his house, and he said, 'Fine, except I don't have anyplace else to live!' "
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