Photo by John Sciulli/Getty Images for MOCA. I’m leaving because I don’t see any current resolution given all the players.”Īctor Pierce Brosnan (L) and honoree Jeff Koons at the MOCA Gala 2017. One source close to the museum told artnet News that the artist Lari Pittman, who resigned from the board in January, “said it best” when he told the Times last month : “It’s a vision problem in what the board wants, what the director wants, and what the curatorial team wants. The Los Angeles Times reported that the $1.4 million in pledges would be returned to donors. (In 2017, artnet News learned, the museum had originally intended to honor Catherine Opie, but the board opted for Jeff Koons instead.) On Friday, the museum decided to cancel this year’s gala altogether. After save-the-dates had already been sent out, however, Grotjahn declined the honor, noting that all the previous honorees were, like him, white men. Notably, a number of wealthy MOCA board members are known to be collectors of Grotjahn’s work the board had also planned to honor him at its annual fundraising gala this year. (Grotjahn did not respond to a request for comment.) The move was seen by some as a deliberate snub. Tension also arose, multiple sources said, when Molesworth sent a junior curator in her place to meet with the artist and MOCA board member Mark Grotjahn about his upcoming solo exhibition at the museum. Installation view of “Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010” at MOCA. The exhibition, curated by Vergne, closed in July of last year. Molesworth, among others at the museum, reportedly objected to Vergne’s decision to mount a solo exhibition of work by the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre (who was tried and acquitted of the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta, in 1985), arguing that it was not the right moment for such a show. In a statement provided to the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, the museum said that it had decided to “part ways” with Molesworth “due to creative differences.” The artist and museum trustee Catherine Opie, however, said that the museum’s director, Philippe Vergne, had told her a different story: that Molesworth had been fired for “undermining the museum.” Discord WithinĪlthough the exact reasons for Vergne’s termination of Molesworth remain opaque, sources say that distrust has been seeping into the groundwater of MOCA for some time-and that goodwill is in short supply. (Molesworth did not respond to requests to comment for this story.) Instead, she pursued projects by lesser-known women and artists of color-an agenda that some powerful donors and members of the board did not share. And she told some that she was not particularly interested in art made by white men. If she was not excited by a particular collector’s holdings or an artist’s work, she did not hide that fact. Multiple sources say that Molesworth was not interested in the diplomacy and statecraft practiced by many chief curators, who approvingly tour private collections and lead donors around art fairs. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. These questions weigh particularly heavily on a museum that has been rocked by crisis after crisis over the past decade, from unsustainable spending that led it to the brink of closure during the recession to concerns over the direction of programming under former director Jeffrey Deitch. Are they expected to set the artistic agenda of a museum? To fund-raise? To charm collectors into donating works of art? Or some combination of all three? At a time of rapid social change, what should a contemporary art museum’s priorities be, and what role should it play in its community? The conflict at MOCA reflects broader tensions in the museum world over what, exactly, the job of a modern-day chief curator entails. (artnet News spoke to nine people for this article, five of whom asked to remain anonymous because of their relationships to the museum.) Ultimately, they said, the competing agendas and approaches proved irreconcilable, and the situation became untenable. During her three and a half years as chief curator of the museum, Molesworth drew accolades for her daring reinstallation of its collection, her fruitful partnership with the Underground Museum, and her scholarly solo exhibitions of Kerry James Marshall and Anna Maria Maiolino.īut behind the scenes, according to several sources close to the museum who were interviewed by artnet News, Molesworth’s personal priorities, progressive politics, and constitutional aversion to flattering donors put her on a collision course with the museum’s director and board. The news that Helen Molesworth, one of the most prominent curators in the United States, had been fired from her job at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) on Monday sent shockwaves through the art world.
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