LA Times Art Critic Christopher Knight Wins Pulitzer Prize

Image: Christopher Knight, 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner, Pulitzer Prize Foundation

In honoring Knight, the board citied “for demonstrating extraordinary service by a critic, applying his expertise and enterprise to critique a proposed overhaul of the L.A. County Museum of Art and its effect on the institution’s mission.”

Christopher Knight, 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner, Pulitzer Prize Foundation

Knight, who had been a Pulitzer finalist three times since he joined The Times in 1989, first noticed that most of the coverage of the project focused on the museum’s architecture and aesthetics with no regard for the purpose it was supposed to serve.

“The building design was going to have a profound effect on how the campus was going to operate in the future,” Knight said. “No one was discussing that.”

Knight, 69, noted a dramatic loss of exhibition space, and that the new layout would have curators working in a building across the street from the museum, separated from the art. Then there were the gallery walls.

He wrote a May column that began:

How do you hang paintings on concrete walls?

“With great difficulty” is the joke answer.

“With great difficulty” is the serious answer too. Hanging paintings on cast concrete isn’t easy.

But that’s apparently what the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has in mind, beginning in four or five years, when a controversial $650-million structure opens on the Wilshire Boulevard campus. ... The gallery walls will be made of the stuff.

Times Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine congratulated Knight and O’Toole for their prizes during a video staff meeting, rather than the traditional champagne celebration in the newsroom — an accommodation for coronavirus restrictions.

“I also want to note that we were finalists in five different categories,” Pearlstine said, “which to my mind was an extraordinary reflection on all of the good work that was done last year under what — until this year — I would have called extraordinarily difficult circumstances. But really, through all of the year, the one thing that was constant was the commitment to great quality journalism and I think everyone in the organization did extraordinary work on extraordinary stories.”