Since he arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art a year ago, director Michael Govan has been striving to create a distinctive identity for the museum, and he isn’t afraid to discard conventional ideas of what the backbone of an art collection should be. “Maybe our museum frames the encyclopedia, or the general museum, on one side by contemporary art, which is usually not a focus of an encyclopedic museum, and on the other end, the historical side, by pre-Columbian art. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to show Egypt, Greece and Rome. But the bookends — the frame, if you will for our museum — are different.”