Philippe Vergne chooses Boston’s Helen Molesworth as Chief Curator:

The Museum of Contemporary Art took the next step in rebuilding its staff and programming, appointing Helen Molesworth of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston as its new chief curator.

A scholar, art writer and curator, Molesworth has been at ICA/Boston since 2010. Before that she headed the department of modern and contemporary art at the Harvard Art Museum and served as the museums Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art. She will start Sept. 1. […]

“Molesworth said that early in her career she was inspired by MOCAs collection of post-World War II art and by former MOCA curators, who helped her shape her own curatorial voice.

She cited three MOCA exhibitions as particularly influential: Paul Schimmels 1998 “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979,” on the postwar merger of performance art with traditional painting and sculpture; “A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968,” the first full-scale museum survey of Minimalist art, curated by Ann Goldstein in 2004 and “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” curated in 2007 by Connie Butler, now chief curator at the Hammer Museum.

MOCA names Helen Molesworth as chief curator, effective Sept. 1 (Los Angeles Times)

Philippe Vergne speaks to the LA Times about his new appointment:

“My vision is to commit to the most experimental artists of our time, but also to contextualize their work within a broader context,” Vergne said in an interview. “And I think Moca’s collection is one of the best to contextualize that kind of experimentation.”

In addition to his five years at Dia, Vergne, 47, has served as chief curator and deputy director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, director of the Francois Pinault Foundation in Paris and director of the Musee d’art Contemporain in Marseille, France. He was born and educated in France.

He has organized exhibitions devoted to individual artists, group shows and shows organized by theme, and Vergne co-curated the 2006 Whitney Biennial. […]

“He’s charming, yet he’s strong and independent. I think he has the independence to say ‘no’ at times, and I think that’s a very strong quality to look for in a director,” Wachs said of Vergne. “We started with a list of over 50, and he really emerged as a person who was perfect for this job…as having the qualities the museum really needs at this time.”

MOCA names Philippe Vergne as new director (LA Times)

The incomparable Jori Finkel breaks the MoCA appointment news:

After a six-month search that fueled intense speculation, the Museum of Contemporary Art here is expected to announce that Philippe Vergne, director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York, has been chosen as its new director, according to people with knowledge of the decision who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Museum of Contemporary Art Picks Philippe Vergne as Director (NYTimes)

The shortlist of potential replacements for Jeffrey Deitch is very short indeed, if this LA Times story is right. Former Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek comes to John Baldessari’s mind and Joel Wachs is said to have a close tie to Ann Goldstein, a former curator now at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Finding names may be less of an issue than creating an environment where the new director can thrive. Some former board members blame the ever-present Eli Broad:

“Whoever they get to replace Jeffrey Deitch will need to have an absolute guarantee of complete curatorial freedom to do the shows they want, when they want,” says former Museum of Contemporary Art board member and art collector Dean Valentine, who currently serves on an advisory board of Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum.

“Until Eli Broad comes to a recognition that he needs to stay away from the museum in anything other than a financial capacity,” he says, “and until the board begins to behave responsibly and financially support the director, then a new director won’t have the tools to revive this amazing institution.”

Others suggest the problem remains with a still dysfunctional board that has yet to set its house in order. The museum runs with a skeletal staff and a budget that is substantially smaller than it was decades ago.

A Post-Deitch MoCA Presents Challenge for Next Director (Los Angeles Times)

The noted art historian, Dean of Yale’s School of Art, and important curator in his own right, Robert Storr has some harsh words for Eli Broad:

Broad and his enabler Jeffrey Deitch are in the process of undoing the work of many committed and knowledgeable people and thereby depriving the public of Los Angeles of a great art institution. Why? Simply because they won’t listen to professionals — the curators, fundraisers and trustees with long service who are now bailing out or being driven out, men and women who actually know more about museums and have more experience running them than either Broad or Deitch, and who have proven over the last 20 years that they are capable of building a world class museum. Moroever, Broad and Deitch have botched the public relations aspects of their bad decisions in ways that make you wonder how they were so successful in other contexts.

Is it any wonder that MOCA can’t even raise the money that Broad has promised to match and so can’t meet its budget without slashing workers? The business model that Broad and Deitch have brought to MOCA isn’t the wave of the future, it is the wave of the recent past and the cause for the economic disaster were are mired in nationally. Dismissing Paul Schimmel in favor of Deitch is like cashing in all your value stocks and doubling down on junk bonds for the sake of a long-shot windfall. Well, the verdict is already in: the future is here and it is grim from every angle.

MOCA and the Art of Being Unreasonable (Huffington Post)

LA’s MoCA announced Blake Byrne as a Life Trustee and Richard J. Grad as new member of the board. It also laid out the details on the acquisition of 100 works of art. Below are the gifts from trustees. You can download the press release with a list of the works acquired by the museum, including LA artists and photography:

Clifford J. Einstein, chair emeritus, MOCA Board of Trustees, and his wife Mandy completed a gift of six works originally promised in 2006, including

• Tony Berlant’s sculpture Gorilla in Art (1986);
• LA Columna Infinita #3 (1995), a drawing by Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado)
• Pergola (2003), a painting by Rosa Loy;
• Fäenger/Catcher (2005), a mixed media work on canvas by Sebastian Ludwig;
• New York Trac (1975), a painting by Ed Moses
• Richard Prince’s drawing Untitled (Drawing 612) (1990).

MOCA Life Trustee Beatrice Gersh completed a gift of David Smith’s sculpture Cubi III (1961), a donation that she and her late husband Philip initiated in 1989.

In honor of MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch, MOCA Board Co-Chair Maria Arena Bell and her husband Bill donated Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s light installation Forever (2001), the first of the artists’ works to be added to the museum’s collection.

Additional major gifts include:

• Before the Cross II (2006), a painting by Barnaby Furnas given by Ivan and Ana Boesky;
• Shirat Hayam (“End of Occupation? Series #2”) (2005), the first work by Barry Frydlender to be added to the collection, purchased with funds provided by Nancy Berman, Alan Bloch, and MOCA Life Trustee Tom Unterman;
• Journey Into Fear (2001), a video installation by Stan Douglas accompanied by a related diptych of photographs, gifted by David Appel and his wife Carol;
• Portrait of Masha (2010), a photograph by Roe Ethridge donated by Maria Baibakov;
• a sculpture and a work on paper by Tom Friedman donated by Edward and Adriana Ryan;
• four Richard Hawkins paintings gifted by Kourosh Larizadeh and Luis Pardo;
• a painting by Lari Pittman donated by MOCA Trustee Peter Morton;
• and four works by Bruce Yonemoto donated by Barbara Wise.

MOCA 2010 Acquisitions PDF

Mike Boehm reports on the progress being made at LA MoCA to bring back the endowment to the levels existing before the museum started spending its capital on exhibitions. The museum now runs on a $16m annual budget down from $25m and has been able to generate cash for the endowment:

The decision to put $4 million of the surplus into the endowment brings the fund to $18.5 million, less than two years after the museum’s meltdown, coupled with the 2008 stock market collapse, had reduced it to $5 million. But MOCA still has along way to go. The board is committed to restoring the endowment to $38 million, which is where it stood a decade ago, before the borrowing to fund exhibitions began.Continue Reading