In the ’90s, director Andrea Rich tried to recruit a then 33-year-old Govan, newly installed at the top perch at Dia, to join the museum, but he rebuffed the offer. He wasn’t sure that Los Angeles was a town for ambitious artists, the types of people who could support a thriving art ecosystem. He recalled what the artist John Baldessari said to his students around the time Govan was a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, a decade earlier: After graduating from one of LA’s much-ballyhooed elite art schools, it was time to leave for a place where art was actually appreciated, namely New York.
By the time Govan was recruited to come to LACMA in the early 2000s, he’d checked back with Baldessari. The artist had changed his tune. Los Angeles, he had decided, was a place where artists could actually live.
“Yeah, he told them to stay—he always told them to go to New York, and he would say this and then there was a moment where he said, ‘No, no, no, no, just stay,’ ” Govan recalls. “ ‘You don’t have to go to New York.’ ”
And so Govan arrived in Los Angeles. As a brash East Coast transplant, he brought with him bona fides in iconoclastic spaces and an air of youth—he was in his early 40s, pretty young for an art museum director. He immediately started to reinvent the span of Miracle Mile that had been bequeathed to him. In 2008 the Broad Contemporary Art Museum opened in a new building by Renzo Piano, the first in a series of stages all designed by Piano, the Pritzker Prize winner most famous for building the Pompidou with Richard Rogers. Govan not only moved on from future design plans, he made it clear that the 1960s buildings would have to be demolished. He was not coy about this.
“I literally came to LACMA to tear the whole thing down,” he told The New Yorker in 2020 as he was tearing it down.
Right off the bat, Govan offered the building to Zumthor, the lauded minimalist architect who had never designed a building in America. No competition, no tryouts, no picking by committee. This was fully Govan’s choice, and Los Angeles had to embrace it.
