On Friday, famed movie director George Lucas and businesswoman Mellody Hobson, co-founders of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, introduced that director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont will step down April 1.
Within the joint assertion, the couple, who’re ARTnews Top 200 Collectors, stated that Jackson-Dumont’s choice to “transfer on” from the function stemmed from a “new organizational design” that splits the place into two: one accountable for “content material path,” which will probably be crammed by Lucas himself, and CEO, to be taken up on an interim foundation by Jim Gianopulos, the previous chairman and CEO of twentieth Century Fox and Paramount Footage. A seek for a everlasting CEO is underway, although Gianopulos will keep on as a particular advisor.
“Sandra’s transformative management over the previous 5 years has been important to making ready the museum for its opening,” the founders stated within the assertion. “Her dedication to advancing narrative artwork and realizing our imaginative and prescient has helped lay the groundwork to determine the museum as an important cultural useful resource for Los Angeles and a future vacation spot for many who will go to from all over the world. Sandra has helped create an establishment that may serve and encourage generations to return.”
Jackson-Dumont’s departure comes simply months after the museum quietly delayed its opening from this 12 months to 2026. The museum has now delayed its opening 3 times—as soon as in response to Covid, then once more in late 2022, which Jackson-Dumont stated on the time was “to verify the constructing goes by the correct readiness and remediation processes,” and lastly in December.
Jackson-Dumont joined the Lucas Museum in October 2019, after 5 years on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork. In July 2020, Jackson-Dumont named named six girls (5 being individuals of coloration) as her first key hires to senior management positions.
“We’re up towards an extended historical past of institutional observe and an extended historical past of individuals not feeling like they are often in establishments,” Amanda Hunt, the museum’s then-director of public applications and inventive observe, instructed ARTnews on the time. “That’s one thing I’ve all the time hoped to interrupt open. We’re constructing one thing anew; we’re a part of that lengthy arc and dialogue—however how can we do this in another way?”
Lucas and Hobson haven’t famous if the remainder of museum management, as appointed by Jackson-Dumont, will stay, or if there are extra adjustments afoot.
The museum, as soon as opened, could have a set spanning all types of visible storytelling, from portray to movie and comics. Its assortment is drawn from Lucas’s private artwork assortment, in addition to the Separate Cinema Archive, a set of 37,000 objects from African American movie historical past that the museum acquired in 2019. Jackson-Dumont had been rising the gathering throughout her directorship. Most prominently, in 2021, the museum bought Robert Colescott’s 1975 portray George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware River: Web page from an American Historical past Textbook for $15.3 million at Sotheby’s New York.
“It’s precisely what the Lucas Museum is taking a look at, this unbridled dismantling of excessive and low,” Jackson-Dumont instructed ARTnews after the sale. “Colescott is a superb artist whose work has instructed so many tales.”
The museum has been in growth for over a decade, with Lucas proposing websites for the museum in Chicago and San Francisco, earlier than asking the latter and Los Angeles to submit proposals for why he ought to web site the museum in these cities. In January 2017, Lucas introduced that L.A. could be the museum’s house and appointed artwork historian Don Bacigalupi, previously of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Artwork in Bentonville, to be its founding president. Nevertheless, Bacigalupi stepped down in February 2019, saying that he would transition to a “particular advisor” function centered on acquisitions; however by October, he was reportedly now not affiliated.
As ARTnews‘ Maximiliano Duron wrote in 2020, the futuristic-looking new museum is sited “inside a really particular context in Exposition Park, a neighborhood in South L.A. that’s primarily Latinx and Black, and that’s surrounded by different cultural establishments, in addition to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the College of Southern California.”
Jackson-Dumont couldn’t be reached for remark at press time.
