The Art That Made Me: Michael Govan

Ekow Eshun: So, thank you so much, Michael, for making this time. LACMA’s new building opens at a moment when the role of museums is being widely discussed around the world, a moment perhaps of transition and shift. How do you see the David Geffen Galleries responding to questions about the public role of museums?

Michael Govan: Well, I’m fond of saying that there’s never been a better time for museums. And that’s not just a playful statement. I actually feel that things that have happened recently—even the calls to tear museums down, to rethink what’s inside them—are massive opportunities. A lot of us have been thinking about museums for decades. One thing that’s important to keep in mind about encyclopedic museums in particular: They are just slow. And it’s good that they’re slow, because part of their job is to preserve cultural patrimony for the future.

What we all understand now is that the order of the world isn’t what it was when many older museums were founded: Greece and Rome, Europe, colonies. The order is so much bigger. And that opens up so much, in every way. One of the first things I did when I got here was to make the point: We’re a museum of everything. And if we are, we need to have surfboards in the collection. We need a car in the collection. We need to think about material culture in a much broader way. I think that a real opening of possibilities is upon us. And that’s what we’re doing in these new galleries here, which look very different from any other kind of museum. They’re not organized the way museums are supposed to be organized. They’re three football fields long, horizontal, with glass all around and no linear path through them. They create a platform for a different kind of meaning and experience. All of this has been discussed in the museum world and in academia for a long time. It’s just that we’re the first ones to put it into concrete, if you will.

EE: Museums are, historically, hierarchical institutions, with hierarchies of knowledge. How do you resolve the tension between those traditions and this kind of space, which is all on a single level, which is organized to flow and to move?

MG: I don’t see any tension. This is intended to have no hierarchy. There are two entrances. There’s no front or back. There’s no up or down. There’s no one path through it. When I commissioned architect Peter Zumthor, we agreed on all of this, and I said, “I’d like to walk through a museum more in the way that you walk through a park—you go left, you go right, you might end up in the same place.” There’s no reason to organize linear histories. Histories aren’t always linear. They certainly aren’t if you’re looking at world culture in every aspect of it. I feel like we’re here for something that’s more true, something that has more potential to tell stories that are real stories.

Another thing is that this new building is designed to be constantly changing. We have a permanent collection of 150,000-plus objects. If you own all of those objects, yes, you could have them in place permanently. But you could also keep them moving, asking different questions at different times, so that people can look at objects from many perspectives over time. Why keep them fixed? This building is not just about the flow of people. It’s actually going to be about the flow of objects, ever changing because history is ever changing, or at least our understanding of it. We’re constantly rewriting it.

EE: You have worked and had leadership roles within several significant institutions—the Guggenheim during the development of Frank Gehry’s Museo Guggenheim Bilbao; the Dia Art Foundation, where you led the creation of Dia:Beacon; the directorship of LACMA for almost twenty years now. What lessons or values did you take here from those past experiences?

MG: Well, one thing to remember is that art’s been around tens of thousands of years. Museums have been around for a relative nanosecond. Don’t equate art with museums. Art is art. It was here before museums existed and will be here if they cease to exist. Humans are creative beings. We’re always making things. Museums come in to play an important role only about framing, creating access, holding.

The museums I’ve worked at are all very different. I started at a college museum, the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which is a teaching museum. I worked to help invent MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, which was a factory conversion designed to accommodate art that was too big for other museums. In New York, the Guggenheim was its own kind of unique vision, which started with the origins of modernism and abstraction, and with a crazy building by Frank Lloyd Wright that is now beloved. I had the chance to help the museum develop an international program with the Guggenheim Bilbao. Dia was something else. It was all about single artists and the value of in-depth understanding of their work, and creating the potential for artists to do things they couldn’t do otherwise. Then I come to LACMA, the museum of everything, in one of the most diverse metropolises on earth, with one of the most diverse collections. It’s kind of the opposite of Dia, but at Dia I learned how to work with space. I learned how horizontal space and walking and natural light can make your visit more like walking through a park or a place with that kind of pleasure—an experience of indoor-outdoor, almost, of looking out windows onto a view. This is the most ambitious of the places where I’ve worked, because it’s a civic-scale art museum.

EE: You’ve become known for the boldness of your vision as a director, for a great willingness to take risks in leading organizations. Who are some of the people who helped shape your way of working?

MG: Well, a lot of my best friends are artists. So artists have been my most important teachers. Artists have this way of taking the past and reconsidering it. What artists do is just breathe for a minute and realize that a lot of what’s around us isn’t actually a given. It could be something else, too.

But I’ve also had a lot of other mentors. Thomas Krens, who was the director of the Guggenheim, asked me at age twenty-five to be deputy director. I was like, “What the heck. I’ll leave art school and try it. I’ll do it for three years and go back to school.” And he was truly bold. I don’t consider myself bold in that sense. He was a historian and a philosopher, and he realized the world was changing and that institutions needed to change. We were living in a more globalized world. He was looking at global economics and the sustainability of museums in that world, and at how politics were changing the environment for museums. He taught me a lot about that—I don’t see these things as fixed. I now feel an obligation to reconsider the frame.

EE: The title of this series of interviews is The Art That Made Me. Could you name ideas or experiences that have shaped you, not necessarily visually, in an art sense, but more broadly than that?

MG: Well, I can start with one that was pretty important to me when I was young and working at the Williams College Museum of Art and MASS MoCA. We were working with Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, a famous Italian collector who collected many artists early on, before anyone else was collecting them, buying work in large groups. He invited a lot of key artists from Los Angeles to intervene and create works in his villa in the north of Italy. Three of those artists were James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Maria Nordman. They were all making art with light in different ways.

When you went to Panza’s villa, he would bring you into a room that was in total darkness as far as you could tell. You were required to stay there for a certain amount of time. And after a number of minutes, you started to see differently. There was a black monolith with light around it, a work by Maria Nordman. When you walked out of that room, for the rest of your visit, it was like leaving a decompression chamber. Your view of the world changed. There was a work by Turrell that looked like a veil of light. Then you went to one of his sky spaces, a tall white room with a square opening at the top, and the sky as viewed through it looked like it was painted on the ceiling. Then you walked around and you looked at trees, which seemed like a flat picture of trees on the wall. But it was actually a window cut through the thick wall of the villa, and it was a work by Robert Irwin, who was playing with the idea of a Renaissance picture. Instead of pretending to represent nature, he had invited in nature itself and made it seem flat. It all just rocked my world. It changed everything in terms of how I thought about experience. One of the reasons I wanted Peter Zumthor to design this building is that he’s somebody who is really known for architecture as a contemplative environment. He understands how to tease out our emotional registers, to heighten our powers of perception.

EE: Can you think of another influence that might come from somewhere else in the cultural world?

MG: Yes, actually. When I got to Los Angeles and was doing research and thinking about LACMA, the place where I spent a lot of time was The Grove, the famous outdoor shopping mall nearby. You have millions of people every year going to shop. At the same time, I’d hear people say that they felt LACMA was hard to get to, and that’s why the attendance wasn’t high at the time. And I thought: “Okay, but there are millions of people going to The Grove, and it’s just four blocks away. What’s the problem?” So I started thinking about the psychology of looking in a different way. And I immediately started to think about changing the LACMA campus.

I got rid of the entrance that was indoors. I made all the circulation outdoors. I thought about people gathering around fountains. What if that fountain, that outdoor feature, was really meaningful? What if, let’s say, it was as powerful as the sculpture Urban Light by Chris Burden that has become a public icon in front of the museum now, on Wilshire Boulevard? I would say that public gathering and the everyday are as important to me as profound art experiences. I lived in Rome for a year, and just to turn a corner in such an ancient city and suddenly see an elephant carrying an obelisk on its back, as a public sculpture by Bernini, was so wonderful. It’s the sculpture but it’s also about gathering. I like the sacred and meditative, but I think equally inspirational is the complexity of everyday life, especially in cities.

EE: Thinking about this city, how do you see this museum evolving and articulating its voice within the very wide communities of Los Angeles?

MG: Because Los Angeles is one of the most diverse metropolises on earth, it’s a place where there’s really no conflict between thinking locally and thinking globally. So what is community? Is it communities and neighborhoods of people who live close together? Is it virtual communities? Our interconnected world has created new conditions for community. We can have personal relationships across and around the world. In the 19th-century museum, the idea was to sort things out and figure out what’s what, distinguish and categorize. Now we’re dealing with a world that’s much more complicated, and we need to understand better how things are interconnected. We live in hybridized cultures, interconnected through migration and communications. And isn’t that amazing? This museum is interested in helping us to find out more about that, about who we are and where we’re going.

EE: It sounds a bit utopian.

MG: It’s just reality. I don’t have an unreal belief that the museum is the panacea for the world’s ills. But it’s a way to try to understand many possible futures.

EE: Let’s talk about The Genesis Talks for a moment, a new program of public conversations about art, ideas, relationships, and cultural imagination launched in conjunction with the opening of the David Geffen Galleries. The first of the talks took place yesterday with Jeff Koons, who reflected on his iconic Split-Rocker, a monumental sculpture now being installed outside the museum’s new building.

MG: For me, The Genesis Talks is an excuse to learn more. I’ve lived long enough and have had enough relationships with artists and creative people that hopefully I’m in a situation where I can maybe ask more probing and complex questions than I could when I was twenty. These talks key into the idea that this museum intends to ask questions as much as it imparts information and answers. One of the biggest issues for me is that museums should not be seen as places for the storage of dead culture. These talks are an extension of that philosophy—bringing living visionaries, artists, people who impact the world. That’s why it makes sense to begin with people like Jeff Koons, Mark Bradford, Darren Walker and Peter Zumthor—they each think deeply about public space, community and experience in very different ways. These conversations help us stir up possibility.

EE: A final question, maybe, would be: In the midst of an ongoing political moment around the world that presents immense challenges to cultural institutions, what remains definitively valuable, in your view of things?

MG: Inclusion. Without a doubt. Politicizing inclusion is ridiculous. Inclusion means I have the widest possible points of view to organize the future. Who turns down opportunity? To me, not being inclusive is literally turning down opportunity, putting yourself in a worse position by not giving yourself more tools, more points of view, more intelligence, more energy. The idea that one would politicize something that’s essential to the best of possible futures is crazy. I was born with that value. I’ve always felt: Don’t you want the dinner party to have the most diverse people at it, for the most fun, at the very least? And if you’re trying to create a museum of world culture, inclusion is the secret weapon of success.

We blessed this building recently with a musical experience designed by Kamasi Washington, the great composer and bandleader. I asked him if he would consider a version of my favorite piece of music that he’s made, from 2017, called Harmony of Difference. It’s several tracks ending in a final track, called “Truth,” which is all those other tracks played together, with a lot of cacophony. It’s very complex. Kamasi made that composition as a kind of homage to the diversity of Los Angeles, the metropolis where he grew up. I was at a bar talking to Kamasi’s father, Rickey, who’s in the band. And I asked, “How do you play that last piece, all of that music simultaneously, all the dissonance?” And he just said: “It’s hard.” And I thought, “Yeah, difference is the key to many possible futures, and it’s also hard. But it’s worth it. The reward is enormous.”

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The Genesis Talks is a public program at LACMA that brings Michael Govan together with some of the most influential artists, architects and cultural leaders shaping how we see and experience art today.

Reflecting a commitment to authenticity, Genesis seeks to foster dialogue on issues that transcend spatial and temporal boundaries, inspiring people to discover the profound through the arts. Genesis Art Initiatives supports institutions and visionaries with an understanding of contemporary challenges and timeless values. To learn more, follow #GenesisArtInitiatives

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Ekow Eshun is an author and curator. His book The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them was published in 2025. He was the curator of the 2025 exhibition “Black Earth Rising,” at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Eshun was awarded an OBE in December 2025.

Michael Govan is the chief executive officer and Wallis Annenberg Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. During his twodecade tenure, LACMA has doubled its gallery space, programs and annual attendance. This year the museum will open a state-of-theart permanent collection building designed by Pritzker Prize winner Peter Zumthor.