ART MUSEUM WON'T REPLACE DIRECTOR.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

In a significant organizational restructuring of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, museum President and CEO Andrea Rich will assume the additional duties of museum director following Thursday's resignation of current LACMA Director Graham W.J. Beal.

Beal, 52, is leaving to head the Detroit Institute of Arts, one of the nation's premier public art institutions.

Rather than replacing Beal, LACMA's board of directors has voted to make Rich responsible for overseeing the museum's curatorial activities while continuing to serve as its top financial officer.

Rich will be assisted by two senior LACMA curators, Robert Sobieszek, curator of photography, and Nancy Thomas, curator of ancient and Islamic art, who have been named deputy directors to help coordinate museum art programming.

Rich, 56, former executive vice chancellor of UCLA, came to LACMA in 1995. Beal was hired as director the following year in what was then an unusual dual-leadership arrangement, splitting LACMA's managerial and curatorial functions.

Rich said Thursday the decision not to replace Beal was due in part to the amount of time it typically takes to find and hire senior art management (at least nine months to a year). Faced with the need to simultaneously build its endowment, launch a major fund-raising campaign, acquire new works, fill five curatorial vacancies, restructure its galleries and mount exhibitions, Rich said, she and LACMA's board felt it would be more disruptive to search for Beal's successor than to forge ahead.

``We've got our mission down, we've got our priorities straight, everybody knows where we're going,'' she said. ``To stop that right now and embark on a national search campaign where the pool (of qualified candidates) is quite small would really hurt our momentum.''