LA’s MoCA board did a lot of business yesterday but the sum total of their actions has allowed Eli Broad to declare victory in his turnaround of the museum, according to Mike Boehm of the LA Times:
At their board meeting Thursday, MOCA’s trustees elected Maria Arena Bell to join incumbent David Johnson as co-chair. Bell, the co-creative producer of “The Young and the Restless” soap opera, has been a longtime MOCA supporter and is co-chairing the museum’s 30th anniversary gala in November with Broad. The Bel-Air resident’s husband, William J. Bell Jr., was a MOCA trustee from 1997 until last year. She also has affiliations with New York’s Guggenheim Museum, the Aspen Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington.
Tom Unterman, the investment executive who co-chaired MOCA with film producer Johnson during its crisis, and had led the museum’s finance committee, becomes a life trustee — an honor, also held by Broad, that doesn’t include voting rights.
Broad has anted up more than half the $56.9 million himself through the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which pledged $30 million in December as the cornerstone of MOCA’s self-rescue plan. The remaining $26.9 million includes $16.4 million in special rescue-giving from members of MOCA’s board, $1.9 million in regular board giving toward ongoing operations, $3 million in gifts from patrons who aren’t board members, and $5.6 million collected from various other sources, including corporate donations, fundraising events, and the fees paid by museum members.
The $56.9 million total, however, depends on a certain amount of chicken counting of still-unhatched eggs. Of the Broad pledge, half is a regular gift with no strings attached, to be paid over five years, with the money earmarked for funding exhibitions. The other $15 million isn’t quite so bankable — it’s contingent on MOCA coming up with a dollar-for-dollar match, with those contributions and the Broad match pegged to replenish an endowment that Broad has said totaled $5 million last December. […] In other MOCA board business Thursday, trustees re-elected Jeffrey Soros as president, and Fred Sands, who recently donated $2 million, was chosen as vice president. Three new trustees were elected: writer-producer Darren Star, whose credits include “Sex and the City,” “Melrose Place” and “Beverly Hills, 90210”; Carolyn Clark Powers, who also is on the collectors’ committee at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Music Center’s dance association; and Marc I. Stern, an investment executive who chairs Los Angeles Opera and is a board member of the Music Center, California Science Center and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
MOCA has Gifts, Officers, Trustees; Pronounces Finances Fixed (Culture Monster/LA Times)
