The head of the Brooklyn Museum, Lehman is the man who gave you the Giuliani-versus-art scandal of the late 1990s when he brought the "Sensation" exhibit to his museum.

Born in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Lehman earned a PhD from Yale before teaching at City College and briefly serving as executive director of the Parks Council. In 1974, he became director of the Miami Art Center; five years later, he moved to Baltimore to head up the city's Museum of Art. He ended up spending a total of 18 years there, boosting its endowment to $40 million and raising its visibility on the national arts scene. In 1997, Lehman was invited to return to his hometown to serve as director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Although he initially turned down the offer, he later reconsidered and has been credited with reviving interest in the dowdy institution by appealing to a younger audience. His approach hasn't been without controversy: Critics have assailed him for dumbing down the museum with faddish exhibits, and for neglecting its own world-class collection in a bid to drum up visitors and publicity.

The number of annual visitors to the Brooklyn Museum has steadily increased in his tenure, but Lehman's efforts have resulted in a good deal of angst. His reinstallation of the permanent collection several years ago was widely panned by art insiders and exhibitions like "Hip Hop Nation" and "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth" were dismissed by many as silly memorabilia shows. Lehman really stirred the pot with the aptly titled 1999 show "Sensation," an exhibition of avant-garde young British artists, that pitted him against the Giuliani administration due to the show's inclusion of Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, which featured Mary festooned with elephant dung and photos cut from porno mags. The outraged mayor shut "Sensation" down two days before it opened, cut off funding to the museum, and later even threatened eviction. Lehman ended up taking the case to court; the city lost the case on First Amendment grounds, and the museum regained its city funding. The high-profile rift generated a good deal of publicity—a total of 175,000 New Yorkers ended up trekking to Brooklyn to see the dried feces up close. [Image via Getty]