Hitch in MOCA leadership plan
Klaus Biesenbach, who recently saw his director role shift, departs for Germany.
Klaus Biesenbach, whose role as director was recently cleaved, is leaving to head a German museum.
Just eight days after the Museum of Contemporary Art said Klaus Biesenbach would run the L.A. institution with a newly named coleader, Biesenbach was announced as the new director of the Neue Nationalgalerie and future Museum of the 20th Century in Berlin.
The move, first reported Friday by the Art Newspaper, is a wild departure from MOCA’s recent announcement of Johanna Burton’s appointment to the newly created role of executive director. In the MOCA news release, Burton said she was “excited to work closely with Klaus on visioning the next era of MOCA, listening closely to our staff and communities, while bringing the museum’s structures into ever-more vibrant alignment with the museum’s values.”
Did Biesenbach’s Berlin appointment catch MOCA by surprise? Did the museum have some inkling of Biesenbach’s imminent departure but choose to keep Burton in the dark? Does MOCA plan on keeping the dual-leader structure it touted so confidently?
After three days, MOCA board chair Maria Seferian and the museum’s external PR representative had not responded to The Times’ requests for comment.
MOCA unveiled its restructuring plan in February. It called for Biesenbach to shift from director to artistic director working in tandem with a new executive director. The move was in response to criticism the museum faced on a variety of issues, including diversity and representation, and it came during a pandemic when MOCA was forced to make painful cuts to staff.
A number of leaders in the art world expressed skepticism about the shared power structure, but Seferian said at the time that a two-pronged leadership structure “makes great sense for the strong future of the museum.”
MOCA said Biesenbach would oversee programming, exhibitions and artistic direction, while Burton would manage finance, education, communications and human resources departments.
Biesenbach was named director of MOCA in 2018. A native of Germany, Biesenbach, 55, served as chief curator at large at the Museum of Modern Art and as director of its experimental satellite space, MoMA PS1.