Posted on December 29, 2008

MOCA Accepts $30 Million Pledge From Eli Broad, Agrees to Restructure

The financially strapped Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has accepted a $30 million pledge from philanthropist Eli Broad, a founder and life trustee of the museum and the city's largest arts patron, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The decision ends speculation that the museum might accept the merger offer made last week by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At the same time, MOCA's beleaguered director, Jeremy Strick, has resigned and the museum has appointed UCLA chancellor emeritus Charles E. Young to oversee the museum's business operations as its first CEO.

According to the agreement, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation will match gifts totaling up to $15 million to MOCA's endowment from trustees and others, while providing $3 million a year for exhibition support for five years. Tom Unterman, one of MOCA's co-chairmen, said that museum trustees have pledged or promised more than $20 million in new gifts since the museum's financial troubles became public in November.

The Broad agreement also calls for MOCA to continue operating as an independent, world-class contemporary art museum," to maintain both its Grand Avenue headquarters and the Geffen Contemporary space in Little Tokyo, and to keep its collection intact and not sell any works of art. MOCA must operate with an annual budget of no less than $13 million while spending no more than $16 million, although the museum will be allowed to operate at a higher level if it has the cash income to do so.

Young, the new CEO, will work in tandem with a newly appointed advisory committee of arts leaders, including John R. Lane, president and CEO of the New Art Trust; Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation; and John Walsh, director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum. "Chuck Young is a very distinguished leader and fills many rolls, but he would be the first…to say that he is not a person of the art world," Unterman said. "We didn't want to connote that he is going to be the next director of the museum."