Dear fellow LACMA Lover,
Thank you for joining more than 3000 concerned citizens who have signed the petition urging the Los Angeles County Supervisors to reconsider their approval of the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for LACMA's redevelopment plan.
Today, the Los Angeles Times published a follow-up to last week’s brutal coverage of the financial and aesthetic flaws in LACMA’s redevelopment scheme, shining a light on the grave funding risk that the project poses for the very survival of the museum.
Another shoe has dropped, and it’s a doozy: Bill Ahmanson, the LACMA trustee whose family foundation has gifted LACMA with some of the finest European Old Master paintings held by any American museum, has gone public with his lack of confidence in director Michael Govan’s leadership. The Ahmanson Foundation has stopped buying great works of art recommended by LACMA curators.
That means every person reading this, as a lover and patron of the museum, has been personally harmed by the decisions being made in administrative offices in the William Pereira tower across from the shuttered LACMA campus. The art that wasn’t purchased as a gift for LACMA might have been your new favorite, but you’ll never have the chance to find out.
How many more of these powerful and disturbing news reports will need to be published before the Los Angeles County Supervisors, who voted to give hundreds of millions of dollars of our tax money to enable the destruction of our public museum, hit the pause button?
Bill Ahmanson, who knows much more about what’s going on at LACMA than the Supervisors have been told, and much much more than the public knows, says “enough, already.”
Will the Supervisors have the courage to do the right thing? Will LACMA?
Please keep sharing the petition link (http://chng.it/PBQw6hhzdX) with your friends who love LACMA and want it to remain at the heart of our city's culture and community. And stay tuned for updates as we have them.
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim Cooper & Richard Schave
The LACMA Lovers League