When Michael Govan joined the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as director in 2006, he had a vision: to create an arts and culture town square, in sprawling and diffuse Los Angeles, along museum-heavy Miracle Mile. He had a 340-ton boulder hauled from a Riverside-area quarry to the Wilshire Boulevard museum in 2012 for a monumental sculpture, by Michael Heizer, to mark his LACMA campus. The artwork, “Levitated Mass,” is a beacon of sorts, visible from the street.
A specialized “transporter,” nearly three freeway lanes wide, carried the two-story-high boulder , which was shrink-wrapped and illuminated with string lights, very slowly over 11 nights — it traveled 5 miles per hour, through four counties and 22 cities , not unlike an evolving, mobile performance art piece. It drew crowds into the hundreds, with spectators wandering onto their porches or front lawns, in their pajamas in the middle of the night, as the spectacle inched toward the museum. It was equally a feat of transportation engineering and a logistical nightmare (traffic lights and power lines were reconfigured).
But the project drew global marketing for the museum, with international TV crews covering it. And it was a harbinger of things to come: Change was on the horizon at LACMA. And, like Govan’s monolith, it was going to be big.
Govan — famously camera-ready, with a slender frame and seemingly elastic smile — has since cemented himself as one of the city’s most influential, if not divisive,.
