SAN MARINO, Calif.—Anne Rothenberg, chair of the Board of Trustees for The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, has announced her retirement from the Board, effective Jan. 1, 2018; Trustee Loren Rothschild will succeed her as chair. Newly elected to the Board is Wendy Munger, longtime member of The Huntington's Board of Overseers.
The five-member Board of Trustees is responsible for The Huntington's governance, including financial sustainability and overarching direction. It is supported in its work by a 60-member Board of Overseers that helps advise on a range of specialized areas, including finance, research, and education, as well as the art, library, and botanical collections.
"The Huntington is an extraordinarily strong institution on an incredible trajectory, and I'm thrilled to have been a part of its leadership," Rothenberg said. "But I now need to step off the board to be able to devote more time to my competing commitments and to my family." A longtime Huntington supporter and a Trustee since 2005, she was elected chair of the board in 2016.
"Anne has played an essential role here, providing key insights and leadership at critical times," said Interim President Steve Hindle. "We are all deeply indebted to her for her commitment to the vitality of this institution."
The Rothenberg name is a familiar one at The Huntington, as the family has played a leading role in philanthropic campaigns on the institution's behalf. The sculpture loggia along the north side of the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art bears the Rothenberg name, as does the new lecture hall in the Education and Visitor Center, the reading room for scholars in the Library, and the courtyard adjacent to the new board room. The position of chief financial officer, which the Rothenbergs endowed, was also named in their honor. Additionally, Anne and her late husband, Jim, have supported a wide range of programmatic activities including exhibitions and art acquisitions.
Loren Rothschild, Los Angeles business executive and a rare book collector, has been a Huntington Trustee since 2009. Before that, he served for 18 years on the Board of Overseers.
Rothschild's interest in rare books and book collecting fueled his passion for the institution. He has long been a collector and scholar of the works of Samuel Johnson and Sir Richard Burton.
Rothschild is co-editor of the publication William Somerset Maugham: A Catalogue of the Loren & Frances Rothschild Collection; the editor of The Letters of William Somerset Maugham to Lady Juliet Duff; and author of Blinking Sam: The True History of Sir Joshua Reynolds's 1775 Portrait of Samuel Johnson and Johnson's Dictionary, among other scholarly publications. He served as the guest curator of the Huntington's 2009 tercentenary exhibition, "Samuel Johnson: Literary Giant of the Eighteenth Century." Rothschild is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the Board of Editors of the Yale edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.
In 2006, he and his wife, Frances, gave The Huntington the "Blinking Sam" portrait by Reynolds, which now hangs in the Huntington Art Gallery. In 2014, they gave The Huntington a major collection of rare books and manuscripts by Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), considered one of the greatest English prose satirists of the 20th century.
Rothschild is president of Sycamore Hill Capital Group LLC, a private equity firm with locations in San Francisco and Los Angeles. His wife is a presiding justice on the California Court of Appeal.
Rothschild holds his Bachelor's degree from UCLA and law degree from Harvard University. He served as a law clerk to Justice Mathew Tobriner of the California Supreme Court and was a partner in the law firm Fogel, Reinhardt, Rothschild, and Feldman.
Before being elected to the Board of Trustees, Wendy Munger served as a longtime member of the Board of Overseers, having been elected in 2004.
Munger, an active civic volunteer and former corporate lawyer in Southern California, earned her bachelor's degree in English from Stanford University in 1972 and her law degree from the UCLA School of Law in 1977. She clerked for Judge Alfred T. Goodwin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and then joined the Los Angeles law firm Tuttle & Taylor Inc., where she specialized in business transactions and contracts.
After taking a break from law practice in the late 1980s for child rearing, she taught part-time at the UCLA School of Law as a Lecturer in Law from 1992 to 1999.
In addition to her service at The Huntington, Munger has served on the boards of Stanford University, Pasadena Community Foundation, Polytechnic School, and the Armory Center for the Arts. Her family has a long history of Huntington involvement. Her stepmother, the late Nancy Munger, served as a Huntington Trustee from 1991 to 2002. Wendy's father, Charles T. Munger, and Nancy Munger provided major support for the 90,000 square-foot Munger Research Center. Mr. Munger continued his support of the Huntington with the leadership gift for the Steven S. Koblik Education and Visitor Center after Nancy Munger's death in 2010.
Serving alongside Munger and Rothschild on the Board are members Andy Barth, Greg Pieschala, and Geneva Thornton.