Chapter 1 (Part 2): LACMA’s BCAM – A Museum Within a Museum

“Even though Eli is not involved with the museum any longer, his name is still on that building. We should have never called it a museum. How can LACMA have a museum? LACMA is the museum.”
– Lynda Resnick, LACMA Trustee[i]

In February 2008, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The Renzo Piano-designed BCAM is not an autonomous museum; it is one of several buildings on LACMA’s museum campus (the largest American art museum west of Chicago).

The original LACMA was not exactly popular. Ed Ruscha’s 1968 vision of the museum.

LACMA was founded in 1961, when it seceded from the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art in Exposition Park.  The new art museum opened in 1965 with three buildings designed by William Pereira: the Bing, Ahmanson and Hammer buildings.  In 1986, the Art of the Americas Building (then the Anderson Building) opened, and was followed in 1988, with the Pavilion for Japanese Art.  The museum continued to grow when LACMA purchased the neighboring May Company department store building in 1994. (LACMA is currently collaborating with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to bring a museum to the vacant building.[ii])  In 2001, plans for a tabula rasa campus designed by Rem Koolhaas were scrapped due to its ambitious scale (all existing buildings would have been raised) and lack of public support (a proposed bill would have provided public funds for the project, but was not passed by voters[iii]).  Then in 2004, the board approved a multi-year capital campaign called Transformation.[iv]

Michael Govan, Wallis Annenberg Director and CEO of LACMA, inherited Transformation when he took LACMA’s helm in 2006 (little more than a year before BCAM’s inauguration). Exciting, high profile, high-cost building projects are Govan’s specialty. Before coming to LACMA, Govan had been the director of the Dia Art Foundation where he oversaw the renovation of an old Nabisco factory in the Hudson River Valley, into Dia Beacon—a gargantuan facility capable of housing many large-scale, contemporary art installations. Before Dia, Govan worked under Richard Armstrong at the Guggenheim Foundation and aided in the realization of the Guggenheim Bilbao.   Govan had the resume required to lead LACMA during Transformation.  Eli Broad was on the search committee that lured Govan to LACMA.[v]

Warhol Inspiration @ Dior, Golden Slippers

Christian Dior, Fall 2013 Collection

Fashion weeks are winding down, and once again many designers turned to art and art history for divine inspiration.  At Christian Dior, Raf Simon recently partnered with the Andy Warhol Foundation to incorporate some of Warhol’s sketches from the 1950s into the house’s fall 2013 collection.  Vogue’s Editor-at-Large, Hamish Bowles was charmed by the dainty flowers, pesky-looking birds, and glamorous beauty profiles that accented some of the looks that came sashaying down the runway.  The Warhol Foundation is doing a very low-to-high-end job of licensing Warhol’s work into tons of contemporary products, from fragrances and skateboards to champagne, and now the Parisian runway.

Andy Warhol for Christian Dior. Or is it Christian Dior for Andy Warhol?

Richard Serra, “Sequence”

SFMOMA, Cantor Arts Center, LACMA

This week, SFMOMA released additional renderings of its eminent expansion including new views of the interior.  Snohetta (the chic, Norwegian architects) and SFMOMA haven’t been apologetic or really skirted the issue about plans to basically gut the entire existing building, keeping only Mario Botta’s  postmodern façade.  Climbing SFMOMA’s imposing stairs is literally my first memory of being in a museum.  As a kid, I tried to recreate the alternating bands of polished and flame-finished black granite of these stairs with a set of sleek dominoes on my living room floor.   A friend and I lamented the demise of Botta’s staircase the last time we visited SFMOMA and we brainstormed potential artist projects that might utilize the soon-to-be-dismantled stairs.  (The SFMOMA expansion is going to be LEED Certified so maybe some of the black stone will be reclaimed.)

“Sequence” at SFMOMA of the future.

Alas, the released images show all of this will be eliminated in the expansion, sacrificed for the sake of greater street presence and improved openness to pedestrian traffic flow.  (The $555 million expansion will also double the current amount of gallery space, so there is that.)  New public space includes a multi-storied, glass-fronted gallery open to Howard Street.  In the renderings, this gallery space is filled with a massive Richard Serra corten-steel sculpture.  This isn’t just a filler “scalie” artwork; Serra’s Sequence (2006) will be installed in the new space when the Snohetta expansion opens in 2016.  Sequence is part of the Fisher collection, the donors who generous donated many buckets of ducats for the expansion, and who are kinda-sorta donating their incomparable trove of contemporary art to the museum.

“Sequence” on Howard Street.

Winter BCAM Shows

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Let’s follow up a long discussion of three shows at LACMA with a very brief discussion of three shows at LACMA.  The three winter shows in BCAM are: Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964–1977, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera—Photographs and Video, 1961–2008, and Color and Form (an installation not exhibition). Let’s make this quick.

Not so much to talk about.

Blinky (yes I’m going to cal him by his first name) is organized by the Dia Art Foundation and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard.  The show’s first stop is LACMA, then it travels east to the Hirshhorn and then north to Dia Beacon.  Interestingly the show is presented by Christies (hmm) and the tour is made possible by Gucci (who knew the Italian fashion house was interested in contemporary art or that the Gucci marketing people are).  Above the entrance to the show is the only semblance of exhibition design, a stupid painted blue triangle.  The only interesting thing to note about this show was that the labels were meticulously hidden in the doorways between each room, limiting distraction.  I think LACMA knows how boring this show is and actually stooped this low in a sad effort to make it interesting.