MOCA faces serious financial problems By Mike Boehm | November 19, 2008
IN TROUBLE: MOCA's Grand Avenue headquarters is one of three exhibition spaces it operates.
The museum has burned through $20 million in unrestricted funds and borrowed $7.5 million from other accounts. Cash from donors is being sought. A merger has not been ruled out.
Los Angeles' prestigious but chronically underfunded Museum of Contemporary Art has fallen into crisis. Museum Director Jeremy Strick said MOCA is seeking large cash infusions from donors, and this week he did not rule out the possibility of merging with another institution or sharing its collection of almost 6,000 artworks.
Federal tax returns show that even before the current national crisis, MOCA had been draining its reserves to pay operating expenses. In the meantime, the museum's staff has grown.
Unlike the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is partly controlled by the county, MOCA receives minimal government funding. Its annual budget has grown to exceed $20 million, but it relies on donors to pay about 80% of its expenses. When the gifts have fallen short, as they have more often than not during Strick's nine-year tenure, the museum has gone into its savings.
In recent years, the museum has averaged 250,000 visits annually to view critically acclaimed exhibitions and a collection boasting works by such post-World War II masters as Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko.
By one important measure -- "unrestricted assets," money that can be used for any purpose -- MOCA is in dire straits. Its federal tax returns show that early in this decade the museum had spent all $20 million of its unrestricted funds to meet routine operating costs. By mid-2007, it had borrowed an additional $7.5 million from "restricted" accounts, even though those are designated by donors for specific uses, such as education or buying art.
In an interview this week, Strick would not disclose more recent financial figures. But he acknowledged that the national economic crisis had further flattened the museum's cushion. MOCA's investment portfolio was worth $20.4 million in mid-2007, down from $36.2 million in mid-2000.
Most investment portfolios have lost significant value this fall.
However, the number of museum employees, including part-timers, has risen from about 150 early in this decade to about 200 in recent years. Strick said that was due to increased educational programs and the addition of a curatorial department for architecture and design.
This month, in a bid to shave 10% off operating costs, the museum announced a six-month closure of its Geffen Contemporary exhibition space, which is leased from the city for $1 a year. So far there have been no staff cuts as MOCA continues operating at the main Grand Avenue museum, whose $23-million cost was paid by the developers of the California Plaza in exchange for the right to use the rest of an 11-acre parcel of city redevelopment land.
Strick said MOCA must sharply accelerate its fundraising to ensure its continuing health. The director planned to meet with MOCA's Board of Trustees this afternoon to discuss a range of options. He said talks were proceeding "with a number of potential partners about a variety of arrangements," but he insisted that a dissolution or takeover of MOCA by another institution was not an option.
"All the possibilities being explored involve MOCA retaining its identity, continuing its program, expanding its collection," he said. But he added: "I think it is time for this city to step forward and offer the kind of financial support commensurate with the work being done."
Eli Broad, L.A.'s preeminent arts patron, said Tuesday that he had had "very preliminary discussions" with MOCA leaders about helping via his Broad Art Foundation. "MOCA is very important to the city," he said. "I hope they figure out a way to remain independent and continue their important exhibition program, which has brought a lot of respect to Los Angeles."
Last month Broad, who was also a key figure in launching MOCA as its initial chairman from 1979 to 1984, approached the city of Beverly Hills about his desire to build a new museum and foundation offices there.
Since its inception, MOCA has grown to encompass three exhibition spaces. The "Temporary Contemporary," later renamed the Geffen Contemporary, opened in 1983 in a warehouse at the edge of Little Tokyo that had been revamped by architect Frank Gehry. Three years later, the museum's permanent home, designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, opened on Grand Avenue, where it is a mainstay of the planned redesign of the area known as the Grand Avenue project. In 2000, MOCA acquired an exhibition space at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.
Before the national economic crisis hit, Strick said, MOCA was gearing up gradually for its first major endowment campaign since the mid-1990s, when it raised $25 million. Now, he said, there's no time for that, and the focus is on "immediate issues and how to move ahead in a very different world."
An irony of MOCA's plight is that, thanks to the appetite of wealthy international collectors, the market value of its prime pieces has soared. Corporations and individuals routinely sell sculptures and paintings in an economic pinch, but a museum that did so would be violating its reason for existing, which is keeping art in the public domain. The codes of ethics of both the American Assn. of Museums and the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, although not legally binding, specify that the only acceptable reason for selling artworks from a public collection is to raise money for buying other, presumably more desirable, pieces.
Strick said it's not unusual for business-minded members of any museum board to ask about selling art to relieve a cash crunch. But the unchanging answer, he said, is that it can't be done because "our mission is preserving and protecting this collection."
For Selma Holo, director of USC's Fisher Museum and the university's International Museum Institute, troubles like MOCA's underscore how cultural philanthropy in Los Angeles continues to lag.
Philanthropists in Chicago, San Francisco and Boston have "a clear understanding" that the health of a city's museums reflects on the state of the city as a whole, Holo said. But "L.A. still has a long way to go" for a similar conviction to take hold among its economic elite. What's needed is for art collectors to put "the sustainable success of their museums before the ongoing development of their personal collections."
Is MOCA's peril a decisive moment for L.A. art philanthropy?
"I don't know if we can say, 'Put up or shut up, now or never,' " Holo said. "Maybe those were questions that had to be asked before the financial crisis. It's a hard time to be making the ask."
Boehm is a Times staff writer.
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MOCA Director Jeremy Strick on the fiscal crisis November 19, 2008
5:30 PM, November 19, 2008
Jeremy Strick, director of L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, sent the following e-letter to museum supporters in the wake of my colleague Mike Boehm's front-page story today on MOCA's fiscal crisis:
Dear Friends:
In view of the article about MOCA published today in the Los Angeles Times, I want to take this opportunity to reiterate the singular commitment of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), to serve the Southern California community and maintain its preeminent position as the foremost contemporary art museum in the nation.
MOCA has achieved unparalleled success since its inspired founding in 1979, and the museum continues to fulfill its mission “to be the defining museum of contemporary art.” For three decades, loyal and dedicated donors like you have made it possible for MOCA to realize an acclaimed program of ambitious exhibitions, and our renowned permanent collection of nearly 6,000 works is among the finest in the country. Today, the museum is proud to present Louise Bourgeois, Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective and Index: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Collection, and MOCA continues to tour our groundbreaking monographic and thematic exhibitions, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution and © MURAKAMI, to prestigious institutions worldwide.
All of us at MOCA recognize the substantial influence you have had at the museum. In this season of economic uncertainty, MOCA acknowledges the considerable challenges that have faced the non-profit sector in recent years, remembering that the wonderful generosity of our closest friends and supporters has sustained the museum during difficult times. Cultural institutions have been affected directly by the volatility of the current economy, and MOCA has not been immune to its impact. While today’s financial realities represent a great test of our longevity, beyond this crossroads is the promise of an even greater future for MOCA.
Your enduring support has upheld the museum’s tradition of excellence in tangible and meaningful ways. We invite you to deepen your personal commitment to MOCA to ensure that this world-renowned institution will remain the definitive leader in the field of contemporary art for generations to come.
With my warmest regards,
Jeremy Strick
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MOCA said to be courting LACMA for bailout10:02 AM, November 20, 2008
Moca_grand_ave In the wake of Wednesday's board meeting to discuss options for the fiscal crisis at the Museum of Contemporary Art, here is what I'm told the board is now prepared to do: formally approach the Los Angeles County Museum of Art about a merger, which will effectively mean a transfer of MOCA's extraordinary collection to the Mid-Wilshire complex.
And here is why that is the wrong move, simply continuing the MOCA board's callow response to a mess of its own making.
If MOCA does makes the pitch, Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes says, LACMA appears ready to make the catch.
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Arts leaders rally around MOCALos Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art.
By Suzanne Muchnic and Diane Haithman | November 21, 2008
IMPERILED: The drastic measures under consideration to rescue MOCA have shocked many arts leaders.
A financially healthy Museum of Contemporary Art is indispensable to Los Angeles, its peers say.
Amid news that the Museum of Contemporary Art is facing a financial disaster -- and unconfirmed reports that MOCA trustees are pursuing a merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art -- leaders of other Southern California cultural institutions have reacted with dismay.
"MOCA has to survive," said Jay Belloli, director of gallery programs at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. "The people who care about it really have to rally to it. The city has to understand how important it is in terms of civic pride and culture."
MOCA changes: In an article in Friday's Calendar section about the Museum of Contemporary Art, artist and MOCA trustee Barbara Kruger was misquoted. In speaking of the programming at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary space, Kruger said, "The level of ambition and seriousness, without the intrusion of demands from a museum bureaucracy, exists nowhere else." She did not say, as the story had it, "the level of curatorial ambition and furiousness, without the intrusion of demands from a museum bureaucracy, exists nowhere else." —
Hoping to avert a potential disaster, Elsa Longhauser, director of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, said: "This is a perfect opportunity for a major donor to step up and make sure that MOCA can prevail. If we don't save this museum, we will lose something that is essential to the life and mind and spirit of the city."
The Times reported this week that MOCA has run so short of operating funds that Director Jeremy Strick is seeking large donations of cash and that the trustees may be considering such options as merging the museum with another institution or sharing its collection. Federal tax returns show that well before the current national crisis, the museum had drained its reserves and dipped into restricted funds to keep up with routine expenses.
Although rumors of MOCA's woes have traveled through art circles for weeks, the drastic measures under consideration came as a shock to many arts leaders.
But Steven D. Lavine, president of California Institute of the Arts, said MOCA's money problems, challenging as they may be, are hardly unique.
"Being able to operate on hope is critical to nonprofit institutions," he said. "Great institutions are formed by visionaries who are driven by ambition and a will to achieve a goal. It isn't surprising that the vision sometimes gets out in front of finances. It's most common in theater companies, which use next season's ticket sales to pay last season's expenses. They get caught in a treadmill that they can't get off."
Los Angeles has plenty of room for a contemporary art museum, Lavine said, even though LACMA includes contemporary material in its broad holdings. "You wouldn't think it was right for Chicago to have only the Art Institute of Chicago and not its Museum of Contemporary Art," he said. "In New York, the fact that the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art show contemporary work doesn't mean you don't need the Whitney, or because you have the Whitney, you don't need the New Museum."
Artist Barbara Kruger, a MOCA trustee, called the museum "the most important contemporary art museum in sight for decades now. It has been a model for institutions across America and Europe."
"What is important to me is that MOCA continue to be MOCA, and that that logo continue to represent the most ambitious, the most powerful and spirited representation of art in America," she said.
Of the programming at MOCA's Little Tokyo exhibition space, the Geffen Contemporary, formerly the Temporary Contemporary, Kruger said "the level of curatorial ambition and furiousness, without the intrusion of demands from a museum bureaucracy, exists nowhere else."
Kruger said the museum carries added import in the global arts community because of its role as a resource for top-flight Southern California arts schools, including CalArts and UCLA.
Among civic leaders who weighed in on the matter, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said: "More than two decades ago, MOCA emerged as an early and critical pioneer in a then-fledgling downtown renaissance. Today, the museum is more than an anchor of this arts corridor -- its unique point of view from Bunker Hill is essential to keeping Los Angeles at the cutting edge as our profile grows internationally."
City Councilwoman Jan Perry, whose district includes MOCA, called the contemporary art museum "way ahead of the curve" in terms of serving the community with programs geared toward teens and families.
"That makes it a lot more complicated, because sometimes the people you serve are not the people who are giving the money," Perry said. "It's a conflicted mission."
Music Center President Stephen D. Rountree said that he had been aware for several years of fundraising struggles at the museum, a neighbor of the Music Center on Grand Avenue, and said the survival of MOCA is crucial to the redevelopment of Grand Avenue as an arts corridor.
"In terms of the broader arts community, and specifically downtown, MOCA is an extremely important institution," Rountree said. "It has really been at the center of both exhibition and intellectual activity around Los Angeles for artists and for scholars. We need it to succeed."
The current economic climate has made life tough for many cultural institutions, said Samuel Hoi, president of Otis College of Art and Design, "but this is precisely the time when philanthropic leadership needs to be demonstrated. It's a time not just to react to a crisis but to be proactive. If everyone admits defeat, it will be very hard for the cultural arena to thrive."
For longtime participants in Southern California's art scene, such as Belloli, MOCA's troubles raise the specter of the Pasadena Art Museum. An avant-garde institution with national stature, it launched a new building it could not afford in 1969. Five years later -- after desperate attempts to gain public support and merge with LACMA -- it was absorbed into what became the Norton Simon Museum.
"For those of us old enough to remember the demise of the Pasadena Art Museum," Belloli said, "it cannot happen again."
Today, Los Angeles and its surrounding area sustain a much more vibrant and varied arts community. But a healthy MOCA is indispensable, arts leaders agreed.
"Anyone who cares about Los Angeles should care about MOCA," said Dennis Szakacs, director of the Orange County Museum of Art. "It is the premier contemporary art museum in the world, not just the United States. No institution has played a larger role in Los Angeles' rise as an artistic capital, alongside New York, London, Berlin and Shanghai. Los Angeles has become a cultural powerhouse. That is what we are risking in letting MOCA struggle. It has delivered for the city for decades. Now is the time for the city to deliver for it."
