ABOUT ROBERT SAIN
Robert L. Sain organizes major exhibitions with a particular focus on artist’s commissions and public engagement.
As founding director of LACMALab, the former experimental arm of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Sain pioneered programs that were both participatory and intergenerational. He invited and challenged artists to produce new work that was “age-free,” and he broke new ground in activating permanent collection objects through artist’s interventions, re-installations and studio activity. By inviting artists, architects, and designers into the life of the institution, every major museum trope was explored in new ways from exhibition design, to signage, to marketing. LACMALab made its mark doing the unknown: bringing together LA’s art schools in a first time collaboration; addressing nanotechnology and aesthetics; conducting a critical examination of museum practice through high school students; asking artists to consider the future.
As director of the Children’s Museum / Museo de los Ninos in San Diego, Sain carved out a unique niche by launching the first major organization dedicated to contemporary art for kids and their families with a special emphasis on bi-national projects with Mexico. Sain opened The Museum School, the first charter school in California to use museum exhibitions and contemporary art as the basis for curriculum.
Most recently, as director of Montalvo Arts Center, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Sain implemented a new vision of engaging people in contemporary concerns through art. He shifted the organization’s international artists’ residency to a purposed program with artists addressing compelling issues of our time as seen in the unprecedented initiative: RAQ: REFRAME.
During the past 15 years, Sain has commissioned over 50 artists from the internationally distinguished to important mid-career to promising emerging artists to create new work based on the quest of engagement and in the process transformed the possibilities of what arts organizations can be.
