She was associate director of the Whitney Independent Study Program ran the graduate program in curatorial studies at Bard and served as the head of education at the New Museum. Although she has considerable museum experience - most recently as director of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio - Burton has spent most of her career in education, and has several advanced degrees in art. “You need to build a foundation first.”īurton, 50, is something of a departure for MOCA’s governing board of artists, business leaders and politicians, given the kind of directors that have drawn their interest in the past. “Panache without the foundation doesn’t cut it,” Weinberg added. “She’s the kind of person who’s in it for the long haul and understands it’s going to take years to rethink the institution.” “She puts the institution before herself and doesn’t have to be the one with all the ideas, but she’s also strong and decisive,” said Adam D. Many say her low-key profile will be a welcome antidote to MOCA’s showier predecessors (Biesenbach was known for posting Instagram photos of himself with celebrities like Patti Smith, Yoko Ono and Lady Gaga). But I think that the lack of stability has also led to maybe the lack of a cohesive picture of what the institution does.”īurton comes to MOCA buoyed by the good will of the art world. I’ve had lots of conversations with people who just want to see it do well and they believe in it. “You’re putting your finger on something that I think actually is one of my prime concerns, which is - as unsexy as this sounds - really prioritizing stability,” she said in her office overlooking the museum plaza and Grand Avenue. In a recent interview Burton said her most urgent priority - and biggest obstacle - was ending the turbulence that has plagued the museum for over a decade. But in less than two weeks he quit to run a museum in Berlin and Burton was given the top job. 3 as executive director to deal with what the museum’s board saw as the management shortcomings of her predecessor, Klaus Biesenbach, a high-profile figure in the museum world who seemed to personify the flashy intersection of the arts and Hollywood. Her path to becoming the museum’s first female director since its founding in 1979 was unusual.
Now, the future of MOCA - which once set the pace here and in much of the country in collecting and displaying contemporary art - rests on a somewhat unlikely savior: Johanna Burton, who was named director in September amid the latest spasm of organizational turmoil. But waves of management upheaval have damaged its reputation and raised questions about its prospects at a time when arts groups all over the country are struggling to regain their footing after the disruptions of the pandemic.
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LOS ANGELES - The Museum of Contemporary Art, with its enviable collection, has long been a symbol of California’s flourishing arts scene, and it helped spur the resurgence of a once barren patch of downtown Los Angeles.
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