Michael Govan
[3] As a twenty-five year old graduate student, Govan was recruited by his former mentor at Williams, Thomas Krens, who in 1988 had been appointed director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.Built in a former Nabisco box factory, the critically acclaimed museum has been credited with catalyzing a cultural and economic revival within the formerly factory-based city of Beacon.[9] In February 2006, a search committee composed of eleven LACMA trustees, led by the late Nancy M. Daly, recruited Govan to run the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.[10] Govan has stated that he was drawn to the role not only because of LACMA's geographical distance from its European and east coast peers, but also because of the museum's relative youth, having been established in 1961.In 2006, for example, Govan invited LA artist John Baldessari to design an upcoming exhibition about the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, resulting in a theatrical show that reflected the twisted perspective of the latter's topsy-turvy world.[15] Since then, Govan has also commissioned Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo to design LACMA's Art of the Ancient Americas gallery, described in the Los Angeles Times as a "gritty cavern deep inside the earth ... crossed with a high-style urban lounge.These include Chris Burden's Urban Light (2008), a series of 202 vintage street lamps from different neighborhoods in Los Angeles, arranged in front of the entrance pavilion, Barbara Kruger's Untitled (Shafted) (2008), Robert Irwin's Primal Palm Garden (2010), and Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass, a 340-ton boulder transported 100 miles from the Jurupa Valley to LACMA, a widely publicized journey that culminated with a large celebration on Wilshire Boulevard.