LA MOCA UPDATES BUDGET CUTS

Leaders of the financially troubled Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art said Friday that they have crafted a balanced budget for the coming fiscal year—but only by sacrificing four planned exhibitions and seventeen more jobs, including two of seven curators, reports the Los Angeles Times’s Mike Boehm. Museum officials hope that a fall exhibition drawn solely from LA MoCA’s acclaimed collection of post–World War II art will be a blockbuster and signal that the museum’s turnaround from last year’s near collapse is well under way.

“It’s a very gut-wrenching thing to go through all this . . . but we think we’ve now gotten through a difficult time, and we are poised to shoot off full speed in the future,” said Charles E. Young, the former UCLA chancellor who became LA MoCA’s chief executive in December.

Young came on board after a tumultuous period in which the downtown museum’s deeply divided board of trustees considered merging with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art rather than take an up-by-the-bootstraps approach to restoring fiscal stability. LA MoCA had run consistent deficits since 2000, siphoning money from its endowment to maintain a highly respected exhibition program. Last fall’s global financial meltdown brought on LA MoCA’s moment of truth, writes Boehm, as the endowment that totaled thirty-eight million dollars in 2000 tanked to a low of five million by year’s end.

The newly announced revisions come after the museum had announced in January the elimination of thirty-two jobs—sixteen full-time and sixteen part-time positions—across all museum departments. More details on the earlier round of budget cuts can be found on Artforum.com here.