The winning candidate lives right there in the city's Rockridge neighborhood with her husband and two young children. Finding her at home is another story.

Lori Fogarty might be watching her 12-year-old son, Willy, playing basketball or, later in the season, at one of his Little League games. She might be commuting to her previous job, executive director of Sausalito's innovative Discovery Museum, the one her 3-year-old daughter, Jane, calls "Mommy's museum."

Fogarty doesn't takes over officially at the Oakland Museum for another three weeks, but she's already dividing her time between Sausalito and meetings with Oakland staff and community leaders. So far, she's winning raves.

"Some people can walk into Oakland and really stub their toe," says Mark Medeiros, who's been the museum's acting director since Dennis Power left the job last summer. "Lori is very positive, with a welcoming personality, and she's been embraced by the community groups that have met with her."

"Mommy's museum" now will be an operation with a $12.7 million annual budget, 95 full-time employees and 150,000 visitors a year. The recent "Baseball as America" show alone drew 23,000.

Fogarty, 43, is one of few women in the country to run a major museum, and she arrives in Oakland at a critical time. The 39-year-old museum is ready to embark on a major renovation with proceeds from a $23 million bond approved by voters, and millions more yet to be raised privately.

The project -- described as "a revitalization, not a renovation" by the museum board's president -- seems to fit Fogarty's skills perfectly. She's won praise for fund-raising, strategic planning and developing programs for families that are educational as well as fun. And it helps that she knows Oakland.

"I certainly know and understand the diversity of the city, and the sense of opportunities beyond the city," Fogarty said as she spent a day in her new office recently.

She would like to attract families from throughout the region, not just Oakland, and is eager to expand the museum's education role in new ways, exploring "the diverse perspectives of the state in a real and compelling way."

The museum's chief curator of education, Barbara Henry, is already impressed. "She's really jumping right in," Henry says. "She asked me, 'Who are the people in the community you think I should be meeting? I want to start right away.'"

The museum draws 75,000 schoolchildren a year to its exhibits, especially the annual "Days of the Dead" installation and the Gold Rush exhibit, a must-see for Oakland's fourth-graders studying California history. Seasonal events, such as the recent Lunar New Year celebration, also draw big crowds.

But for a number of reasons, Oakland Museum is overlooked by many East Bay residents, even though it's close to Lake Merritt and only two blocks from the Lake Merritt BART station. Designed in the 1960s to fit unobtrusively into its neighborhood at Tenth and Oak streets, the museum may do that all too well.

Fogarty doesn't gloss over the challenges or the need to correct misconceptions. The art exhibits get news coverage, but many Bay Area residents don't know about the museum's equally impressive history and natural science departments. Others believe it's just a museum about Oakland, or Oakland history.

"The perception is that nothing changes -- that once you've been here, you've seen it all," Fogarty says. She wants to change that, using the museum's refurbishing as a springboard, with exhibits that span art, history and natural science, and interactive features that visitors could continue on their home computers.

"I have a million ideas," she says. "What are the great stories of California? What makes this state so distinctive? For example, the development of the railroad and how it changed everything. The Bay. I'd like to see a great show on the mural movement. I want there to be a real broadening beyond the Bay Area -- there's so much happening in art in Southern California."

Some recent Oakland Museum exhibits have been distinctive -- showing, for instance, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser's effect on everything from shipbuilding to health care, and the conflicting social and political effects of the Vietnam War era on California.

"That's what we have to figure out," Fogarty says, "exhibits nobody else could do."

Thinking outside the box comes naturally. Born in Colorado to parents she describes as "Depression-era Iowa farm stock," Fogarty and her four older brothers were encouraged to pursue the arts. She attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, planned to be a journalist, did an internship at the Los Angeles Times and graduated with honors with a bachelor's degree in English.

Her first job after college was in public relations at the Los Angeles Music Center, and she moved up the ranks in fund-raising, joining the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1988 to help develop corporate and government support. In what she calls "a leap of faith," she was promoted to the administrative side as deputy director overseeing curators, then senior deputy director.

After 12 years at SFMOMA, she was hired as executive director of the Bay Area Discovery Museum in 2001. She helped lead a $19 million fund-raising campaign that transformed and expanded the museum with new, hands-on attractions.

Fogarty says her husband, Skip, who works with the nonprofit Team Up for Youth organization based in Oakland's Chinatown, is happy that she's returning to "a museum that has art," and to a job closer to home. It works for her, too -- while she attended a big-league reception at the museum to accept a $1 million check from Chevron, he was home watching the kids.

The couple moved to Oakland from San Francisco eight years ago. "We wanted a garage, a third bedroom and a yard," she says. "We got in just before the door shut."

The greatest challenge in her new job is to broaden the Oakland Museum's base of support, Fogarty says.

"Things look bright. I've been around the region. I've had my eyes wide open," she says. "The staff is energized. In my first interviews I asked everyone, 'Is there an appetite for change?' People have been unbelievably welcoming and enthusiastic."