Fearless Leader
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Fitzpatrick, dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia, had good reason to feel disoriented, given the haste of his appointment. Just three weeks ago he received a call from an executive headhunter who asked if he would be interested in pursuing the directorship. With no museum experience, Fitzpatrick will take over an institution racked by firings and resignations and suffering from a leadership vacuum created when director Kevin Consey announced that he would leave this fall. In the wake of Fitzpatrick’s appointment, many local observers are wondering how soon he will cross swords with the board, a group of contemporary art aficionados with a reputation for muscling in on the museum’s operations. But Fitzpatrick isn’t worried: “I like to do things I don’t already know how to do.”
A native of Toronto, Fitzpatrick comes to the MCA with a varied resume, and despite his lack of museum experience the trustees were impressed by his broad exposure to the arts. He’s been an assistant professor of French at the University of Maine at Orono, dean of students at Johns Hopkins University, and a member of the Baltimore city council. In 1975 he became president of the California Institute of the Arts, a university devoted to the visual and performing arts; there he began to display his managerial skills, turning around a troubled, nearly bankrupt institution. Fitzpatrick says he did this in part by inviting Hollywood moguls like Michael Eisner and Barry Diller to join the school’s board of trustees. While presiding over CalArts, Fitzpatrick also directed the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles, a massive ten-week event that included 424 performances and exhibits by artists from around the world. With no experience coordinating such a mammoth affair, Fitzpatrick says he simply called up everyone he knew in the arts and asked what should be part of the event. When certain artists and performers were mentioned again and again, he went after them.
