Word: govan
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Reared in Arlington, Va., Govan taught drawing in high school, hoped to be an artist and double-majored in studio art and art history at Massachusetts' Williams College. There he met Williams College Museum of Art then director Thomas Krens who, spotting talent, soon had him designing brochures and posters. "He was fast, quick, bright and mature beyond his years," recalls Krens, today director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. "Michael seemed preternaturally sophisticated about...
...Govan got considerable on-the-job training with Krens during the expansion of the Williams museum and the creation of Mass moca, an enormous art and performance space nearby. Govan did some graduate work at the University of California at San Diego, but his advanced education has come more from life experience and particularly from mentor and colleague Krens. When Krens went off to run the Guggenheim Museum in 1988, Govan joined him as deputy director...
Instead of producing his own art, Govan has spent much of his career nurturing and learning from artists. At the Guggenheim, he came into contact with such artists as Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, and when he got to Dia in 1994, he helped his artists dream big. Besides offering them close to 240,000 sq. ft. (73,000 sq m) of exhibition space at Dia, he embraced such large-scale earthworks as Michael Heizer's City project and James Turrell's Roden Crater...
...LACMA, he has involved artists wherever possible. Sculptor Jorge Pardo is designing a reinstallation of the museum's pre-Columbian collection, while Govan and senior curator of modern art Stephanie Barron invited artist Baldessari to install last year's René Magritte and Contemporary Art show. Baldessari came up with a ceiling image of intersecting freeways and a carpet of sky and clouds. "Usually artists can't be compensated at market level for their time," observes Barron, "but Michael got Lexus to underwrite the installation. Michael's passion for art is infectious...
...Govan has brought in new corporate sponsors and expanded the board to include such trustees as Barbra Streisand; Broad says trustee giving has tripled during Govan's tenure. Museum guards wore Magritte-style bowler hats for that exhibition and donned sunglasses for this summer's retrospective of neon artist Dan Flavin, which co-curator Govan brought to LACMA at the end of a world tour. "The Flavin exhibition was beautifully selected, installed and almost choreographed," observes artist Alexis Smith. "Its level of visual sophistication was doubly interesting because it was done not by a museum curator but by a museum...