The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles – which has climbed back from the brink of financial dissolution and secured donations and pledges of more than $100 million for its endowment in recent months – has selected Helen Molesworth, a widely respected scholar and writer, to be its next chief curator.

Ms. Molesworth, 48, has served for the last four years as the chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where she organized ambitious thematic exhibitions like “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s,” which opened in the fall of 2012. Before that, she held curatorial positions at the Harvard University Art Museums, the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Ms. Molesworth’s selection is the first major hire by Philippe Vergne, who took over earlier this year as the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art after three rocky years under the leadership of Jeffrey Deitch, a New York art gallery owner and curator who was criticized by some for moving the museum too far in the direction of pop culture. The 2012 departure of the museum’s longtime chief curator, Paul Schimmel, who had clashed with Mr. Deitch and left under pressure, exacerbated tensions and led to the resignation of four prominent artists who had served on the museum’s board. The museum has operated with a tiny curatorial staff and no chief curator for more than a year.

Ms. Molesworth, a New York native who received her doctoral degree in art history from Cornell University, said she thought of museums as “reservoirs of slowness in a very fast culture.”

“The struggle with a contemporary art museum is how to preserve some of the quickness of the culture we live in but also to stay true to the kind of slowness that is great about art,” added Ms. Molesworth, who will begin the new job in September. “I think one of the things Jeffrey was great at was speed but there’s also a value in knowing how to take your time.”

> via NYT