If you’re an artist, you need a day job.
That’s what Michael Govan attributed as his entrance into the museum world. The current director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was trained to be an artist and worked in graphic design and architecture for his college museum, the Williams College Museum of Art. Decades later, after leadership roles at institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Dia Art Foundation, he was invited to lead LACMA as its CEO and director in 2006.
Since 2006, Govan has reconstructed LACMA through high-profile campaigns that included the installation of Chris Burden’s “Urban Light” and Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass.”
Govan will speak as the opening lecturer for the 2014-2015 Design | Media Arts lecture series Tuesday night. The event is free and open to the public. It can also be streamed online through the UCLA Design | Media Arts website.
“We try to program the opening and closing (of the lecture series) to interest a diverse group of students. This year, we invited (Govan), who has done a wonderful job of putting LACMA on the map,” said Willem Henri Lucas, the faculty host for the lecture and professor in the Design | Media Arts department.
Lucas said that he thinks it is important for UCLA to get a stronger presence both in Los Angeles and the city’s institutions. He hopes that this lecture can help strengthen these connections.
“(Choosing guests) is primarily based on if the person has something new coming up. … It taps into actuality, what’s going on (in the contemporary art industry) right now,” Lucas said.
As director of the largest art museum west of the Mississippi, Govan is responsible for working with a board of trustees and scholars and the City of Los Angeles, as well as directing dozens of curators and staff members.
“It is not dissimilar to a university,” Govan said. “It has many departments and like a university, we are always raising money to improve, to acquire works, do research, to publish and to expand what we can give to the public. The difference between us and a university is that we are committed to serve the everyday public.”
Govan said he hopes that through this lecture, he can communicate a fresh perspective on museums in a media- and Internet-centric world.
“At a 100-year-old university like UCLA, Design | Media Arts is a very new concentration – it is an invention of the present,” Govan said. “In the same way, museums are a very old idea, but the program for LACMA is trying to be that new invention that looks at, educates and presents art in newer perspectives.”
Govan said his vision is to create a multicultural museum to complement its multicultural city and disregard the traditional hierarchy by highlighting film, design and photography. Govan also wants to make the case that despite the technologically oriented present, museums will not become obsolete.
“When the board asks me, ‘Why are you investing so much money in giant rocks and steel lampposts in an Internet media age?’ I (tell them), ‘Because you have to have your picture taken somewhere’. And that sense of place never goes away,” Govan said.
Recognizing that the world is becoming more technologically oriented, Govan said he also wants to branch out as an educational resource in ways such as publishing tens of thousands of high-resolution, royalty-free images online.
“We are at the forefront of distributing information and images. We were the first museum to tweet in English and Spanish. We were one of the first museums to start using Snapchat,” Govan said.
Govan said that one of his objectives is to strengthen the relationship between educational and public institutions and promote the value of the museum as a resource. He has taught in the UCLA art department one quarter a year for the past four years and he is currently working with the UCLA art history department to integrate LACMA as a core part of the department’s curriculum.
“I think students can get a great deal out of listening to Govan because he always makes his points directly, and he’s not interested in speaking exclusively to a professional or specialized audience,” said Russell Ferguson, a UCLA art professor and curator at the UCLA Hammer Museum.
Ferguson said he believes there will be a lot of different points of entry in the lecture for people who don’t feel they have a lot of art background. He said students can be a resource for museums and museum professionals to develop ways of engaging the student demographic. He also said that they can force professionals to ask themselves questions about why things are done the way they are.
Overall, Govan said he sees the future of LACMA as a source of inspiration for the people of Los Angeles, whether they are artists or scientists.
“Artists and designers here have way more freedom. … They still have sort of a Wild West approach, anything goes,” Lucas said. “I think everyone in the L.A. community should embrace the arts in that way.”