It is a very happy Christmas for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which has secured itself a nice holiday present: four new board members. They are the Los Angeles-based artist Lari Pittman, the philanthropist Mary Klaus Martin, the hedge fund manager Adam Sender and the financier Gabriel Brener (who also bought a controlling stake in the Houston Dynamo football team this week). The museum, which was founded by a group of artists in 1979, has been working hard to add artists back onto its board after John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha resigned in 2012 in protest of the museum’s programme under its former director Jeffrey Deitch. Pittman is the sixth artist to join the 49-member board since Philippe Vergne took the helm of the institution in 2014. Baldesssari, Opie and Kruger returned to the board that year along with the painters Mark Grotjahn and Mark Bradford. In a statement, Vergne said the new additions reflect the museum’s goal “to become a better artist’s museum”.
