Lower than a month after asserting its opening date, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Artwork informed workers that chief curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas is leaving the museum this week.
Rivas didn’t reply to a request for remark.
The $1-billion Lucas Museum, which stays on observe to open on Sept. 22, 2026, issued a press release that mentioned, “We thank Pilar Tompkins Rivas for her hard work over the last five years, which has been instrumental in preparing the museum for its opening. We wish her well in her future endeavors.”
Rivas’ departure comes 9 months after former museum director and CEO Sandra Jackson-Dumont stepped down from her function. Jackson-Dumont didn’t remark publicly about her departure, however the museum mentioned in a press release on the time that her resolution was based mostly on a “new organizational design” that may break up her job into two positions, with Lucas accountable for content material path and Gianopulos, the previous chairman and CEO of twentieth Century Fox and Paramount Footage, assuming the CEO title till a everlasting one could possibly be discovered.
Three months after that, the museum laid off 15 full-time workers, many from the group’s training and public programming group — amounting to 14% of the full-time workers. An extra seven part-time, on-call workers additionally misplaced their jobs. At the moment, two workers, who requested to stay nameless out of concern of retaliation, described the layoffs as surprising and chaotic.
In 2020, the Lucas Museum was touted for appointing six ladies — 5 of whom have been ladies of shade — to management roles. That quantity didn’t embrace Jackson-Dumont. With Rivas not in her job, solely two ladies employed at the moment stay: Larissa Gentile, managing director of particular initiatives, and Erica Neal, director of computing and infrastructure.
“I’m an advocate for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, that’s a huge part of who I am,” Jackson-Dumont informed The Occasions in 2020. “But when I’m hiring, I’m looking for the best and most qualified candidates — and that was them.”
Rivas is understood for her connection to Los Angeles and its various communities. She was previously the director and chief curator on the Vincent Worth Artwork Museum at East Los Angeles Faculty. Previous to that she labored as coordinator of curatorial initiatives on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork. Her resume additionally contains curatorial and undertaking coordinator positions at Santa Monica’s 18th Avenue Arts Middle, the UCLA Chicano Research Analysis Middle and the Claremont Museum of Artwork.
