The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles has named the former public media leader Jonathan Abbott as its new director and chief executive, the museum announced on Thursday.
The appointment of Abbott, 64, is the culmination of a search that lasted more than a year. He is the museum’s sixth director in 18 years and the first to also be its chief executive. The museum, which is known as MOCA, has not had a chief executive since 2010.
For 15 years, until 2022, Abbott was the president and chief executive of GBH, the Boston-based public media network that produces PBS staples like “Frontline,” “Nova” and “Masterpiece.”
Carolyn Clark Powers, the chair of the museum’s board of trustees, described Abbott in a statement as a “builder of mission-driven institutions and a deeply collaborative leader.”
“He brings the experience and imagination to help MOCA extend its reach, deepen its relationship with Los Angeles and give artists and curators the strongest possible platform for their ambitious work,” she added.
Johanna Burton, who was appointed MOCA’s first female director in 2021, left last year to lead the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Ann Goldstein, a onetime senior curator at MOCA, has since been its interim director.
Founded by artists in 1979, MOCA is widely viewed as having helped establish Hollywood — and, in particular, a gritty stretch of downtown Los Angeles — as a destination for world-class art. But the museum, which has an 8,000-piece collection and a $25 million budget, has faced existential threats in recent decades, including a heavily depleted endowment and an aggressive merger bid from its longtime rival, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
As younger institutions in the city, including the Hammer Museum, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the newly opened Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, have claimed the spotlight, the churn in leadership at MOCA has strained the museum’s relationships with artists, donors and the public.
In a phone interview on Wednesday, Abbott said the museum should be “at the forefront of championing contemporary artists and new work” while helping ensure that the city retained its “sense of discovery and revelation.”
“L.A. is a creative center in this country and in this world, and I think that should be reflected in the way in which artists are celebrated and showcased here,” he said.
Abbott cited two of MOCA’s recent exhibitions — “Monuments,” featuring decommissioned and re-contextualized Confederate statues, and “Regime: Dramatis Personae,” a series by the photographer Alexander Apóstol highlighting the history of political resistance in Venezuela — as in keeping with that mission.
Among his initial priorities, he said, is reaching new audiences through video content tailored for social and digital platforms, a task he also took on at GBH.
“We have extraordinary stories behind the work we choose to exhibit and the artists who made that work,” he said. “Those stories can draw people in who might not see themselves as going to a museum.”
Abbott, a graduate of Columbia University and Stanford, moved to Los Angeles four years ago after more than two decades in Boston. He said he felt prepared to lead one of the entertainment capital’s most venerable cultural institutions, though he acknowledged that the dress code and party calendar might be an adjustment.
“We’re a little bit more makeshift in public media,” he said.
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