Michael Govan
Arts Visionary; CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director
Michael Govan joined the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) as Chief Executive Officer and Wallis Annenberg Director in 2006. In this role, he oversees all activities of the museum, including art programming and an ambitious, multi-faceted expansion and upgrade of the museum’s seven-building, twenty-acre campus, most recently including the addition of the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion in 2010. Since Mr. Govan’s arrival at LACMA, he has pursued his vision of contemporary artists and architects interacting with the museum’s historic collections, as evidenced by exhibition and gallery designs in collaboration with artists John Baldessari, Jorge Pardo, and Franz West, and architects Frank O. Gehry, Fred Fisher, Michael Maltzan, and others.
Mr. Govan has additionally orchestrated the commission and installation of the monumental artist projects that dot the museum’s campus, beginning with Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008), Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Shafted) (2008), Robert Irwin’s evolving palm garden (2008–2010), Tony Smith’s Smoke (1967; installed 2008), and most recently Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass (2012). Under Mr. Govan’s leadership, the museum acquired by donation or purchase more than 19,000 works for the permanent collection, including one of the most significant private collections of the art of the Pacific Islands assembled in the twentieth century; the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection of photography—3,500 prints that form one of the finest histories of photography from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a collection of more than 500 examples of fashionable European dress and accessories dating from 1700 to 1915; and a number of significant individual gifts by the likes of Thomas Eakins, Henri Matisse, and Maruyama Ōkyo. LACMA was also the recipient of the Lazarof Collection, a group of 130 works notable for its holdings of objects by leading figures of modern art.
Known for his curatorial work as well as for his museum leadership, Mr. Govan co-curated the acclaimed retrospective for James Turrell (2013–14), which now on an international tour. He also co-curated The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA (2013), which presented plans for a future building for the museum designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning architect. Mr. Govan was the co-curator of the touring exhibition Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, organized by Dia in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The exhibition concluded its international tour at LACMA, where it was on view in summer 2007.
From 1994 to 2006, Mr. Govan was President and Director of Dia Art Foundation based in New York City, where he spearheaded the creation of the critically acclaimed, 300,000-square-foot Dia:Beacon, a museum in New York’s Hudson Valley that houses Dia’s renowned collection of art from the 1960s to the present. Dia’s collection itself nearly doubled in size during Mr. Govan’s tenure.
Prior to Dia Art Foundation, Mr. Govan served for six years as Deputy Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In that capacity, his work extended to Guggenheim branches in New York, Venice, and Bilbao. While at the Guggenheim, he organized numerous major exhibitions and produced related scholarly publications, including the
multi-disciplinary The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932, and oversaw the reinstallation of the museum’s collection galleries.
Michael Govan was born in 1963 in North Adams, Massachusetts. He holds a B.A. in Art History from Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he served as Acting Curator of the Williams College Museum of Art. Before continuing his studies at the
University of San Diego, Mr. Govan studied Renaissance art in Italy