Still in the early days of your tenure in the most prestigious museum job in the country, you have already developed an ambitious program of exhibitions and brought major works of art to our National Gallery. Few can be surprised by the speed of this accomplishment given your previous record. In 12 years as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art you quadrupled its annual budget, added 40,000 works to its permanent collection, more than doubled its membership, and added 281,000 square feet of new or renovated space—transforming it, according to the magazine Art in America, “from a local institution to a museum of international stature.” You also are credited with launching programs in Los Angeles that engaged a wide cross section of the county’s highly diverse population—so that fourth grader Alvaro Medina spoke for many when he wrote to you the following: “I hope you like my letter because I’m writing it with all my heart. Why do you have to go? I like you better here.” We, however, prefer to think that you have not been lost to Los Angeles but gained by the nation, as you now bring to the directorship of the National Gallery a deep love of art, (spawned, you have said, on this very campus), highly effective skills in leadership and administration, what the Washington Post has called your “good guy normalcy,” and your ambition for art museums that they become “educational institutions … [that] shape people’s vision of history.”
Megamenu Social