Michael Govan, LACMA CEO, and Wallis Annenberg, director of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), were recently in Mumbai as part of a cultural exchange with the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), which aims to highlight India’s growing cultural voice on the global stage, foster dialogue and collaborate on various projects. Isha Ambani, who is part of the executive leadership teams at Reliance Retail, is a member of the board of directors at LACMA.
LACMA, in April 2026, will open the David Geffen Galleries, which is the new home for its permanent collection. The building, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor, was under construction for about two decades and was completed at the end of 2024. The building is named after David Geffen, who made a gift of $150 million to the museum, and towards which the County of Los Angeles invested another $125 million.
Speaking to Forbes India, Govan talks about the cultural and artistic differences between the two countries, and how he aims to make LACMA a centre of living cultures and artistes from across the world, and not just one that preserves and celebrates the past. Edited excerpts:
Q. You had an event earlier this year to showcase the new David Geffen Galleries. How far is it from being opened to public?
We had a celebration of the completion of the gallery space in summer where we had thousands of people see the building empty. It's a work of art in itself; it's a sculpture. It is three football fields long and crosses Wilshire Boulevard, the central boulevard of Los Angeles. And now we're installing close to 3,000 artworks… we will open the galleries to the public with art from our world collections in mid-April.
The project has been in planning and construction for two decades. And here, in India, everything gets built in five minutes [laughs]. This is a big difference between there and here.
Q. Since you have been collaborating with NMACC for a few years now, what are the other differences that you see between there and here, and which can be highlighted through you work?
One difference is that in the United States and its museums, there's a big tradition of a global outreach. We've been working with many parts of the world for many years. In India, generally, art institutions have been more India-centric. I am noticing at the art fairs, in conversations with artists, in institutions that there's a new interest in connecting globally. There hasn't been as much interest in connecting globally [before]. I think we can take advantage of this openness.
There has existed the tradition of institutions exchanging exhibitions. But with modern communications and travel, we can establish personal connections that are sustainable in the long term, and learn more deeply by building friendships. I have just returned from Tokyo and Shanghai, where we can build long-term friendships that will make all of us more aware of everything that’s going on in each of our worlds and bring them together.
These are not going to result immediately in giant exhibitions, but we're slowly beginning to buy and acquire works of art by living Indian artists, so that we don't just have a traditional collection of ancient art but also art of contemporary relevance. We participated in the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, with an art and technology project that involved artificial intelligence (AI). So, we're also in the most cutting edge of digital art as well, which is obviously India as it is one of the great centres of technology right now.
Also Read: Indian art market sees dip in sales, but high-priced pieces buck trend
Q. India has a vibrant and diverse craft sector, which is different from the US. And how can these tradition-based differences be highlighted both at LACMA and at NMACC?
I'm taking my trustees to Swadesh [an initiative by The Reliance Foundation to preserve and promote India’s arts and crafts] this afternoon and we're going to look at what's happening there. For certain other museums, [which look at] contemporary artisans, and modern art museums, maybe this wouldn't be as relevant as it is for LACMA, where we have a long history of traditions such as textiles, carpets and silver. So, although we have historic collections of Indian art that are very important, I want us to be focussed on the present, on living people and living culture, and make our historic collections relevant to this living culture.
The preservation of craft traditions in India is very strong, and in that craft tradition is knowledge that is important for our future. We're doing this in other countries as well. For instance, we work very closely with the Arhuaco people in the Sierra Nevada in Colombia in Latin America; we are looking at indigenous traditions and are working with communities to recover lost art forms and practices, and to see how that impacts our future.
India is one of the largest nations, with the largest traditions and collection of traditions in one place. And this partnership with NMACC will give us access to the crafts, communities and expertise. We hope we are able to learn and integrate this knowledge and experience into our world collections.
We also hope we can help Los Angeles artists; we're talking about residencies. Can we bring Los Angeles artists, film makers, fashion designers and poets to India, to Mumbai.
Q. One of LACMA’s ongoing exhibitions is about Buddhist art throughout Asia. And you also mentioned your recent visits to Tokyo and Shanghai. What are the partnerships that LACMA is fostering with Asian countries?
We have an exhibition on view right now of our traditional Buddhist collections and we're about to bring some of those works and others into the new David Geffen Galleries. But in in doing that, we're also discussing commissioning works of art from young, contemporary artists to be part of this exhibition.
In Southern California, Buddhism is everywhere, alive and well. In the past, we were happy to just show historic art. Today we feel it’s absolutely essential to engage with living culture. But [these efforts] take personal research and connection.
The big missing piece of LACMA for so long, in terms of connection to contemporary culture, has been India. So, we need to be here, learning and making friends, and we're doing just that.
Q. How do you strike a balance between preserving the past and encouraging the present and future?
I don't see any balance; I see them as the same. I, myself, studied to be an artist. I took that route, rather than art history and a lot of my friends are artists. Artists are always preserving the past like being in the present. Expressing your identity ought to be built on your ancestry. And so, I feel there's an artificial separation that has taken place between museums, because they're good at it. They have curators and deal with historical artefacts. And then we've developed these contemporary and modern art museums, which cater to the present. We don't live in the past; we live in the present. And artists and thinkers are always reconstructing and constructing our relationship with history from the present.
So, I don't see that conflict. Our collections will be brought to life by being in the present, and framed by, art of the present.
First Published: Nov 25, 2025, 15:42
Subscribe Now