For nearly a year, MoMA PS1 has been looking for a candidate to fill its leadership position. Now, the Queens museum has announced that it has found its new director in Connie Butler, chief curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. at UCLA since 2013. She will start in September.
“It’s a place that’s always been very close to my heart,” Butler told the New York Times. “It has artists at the center of its mission, which has been essential to my work.”
“Connie Butler is widely known and admired as a pioneering curator and researcher, as well as a dedicated mentor for aspiring museum professionals,” MoMA Director Glenn Lowry said in a statement. “With her close working relationships with artists, established and emerging, and her longstanding ties to MoMA and New York, we know she will drive MoMA PS1 forward in all aspects of its ambitious program. I look forward to working with her again. »
The post was previously held by Kate Fowle, who resigned in the summer of 2022just three years into his tenure, without citing a reason for leaving.
Butler has been instrumental in the rise of Los Angeles as a center for the creation and viewing of contemporary art, in part through the Hammer’s recurring exhibition “Made in LA”, which focuses on practitioners from the area. . She organized the second edition, in 2014.
Feminism has been a major concern for the curator, and she has worked hard to recognize female artists. “I have always honestly felt the deep rage that comes from being a woman growing up and coming of age under patriarchy in the United States,” she said in a 2021 interview with UCLA.
She co-organized the program “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, of which she was curator from 1996 to 2006 (it traveled to MoMA PS1 in 2008). She also co-hosted shows dedicated to Adrian Piper (2018), Lygia Clark (2014) and Marisa Merz (2017), and co-edited the 2010 volume. Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art.
Butler has contributed to several major exhibitions at MoMA PS1 in the past. She was part of the curatorial team for “Greater New York” (2010) and has co-curated major exhibitions, including “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980” (2012) and “Mike Kelley” (2013). She is also familiar with the PS1 partner institution, having been chief curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art from 2006 to 2013.
Before joining MoCA LA in 1996, Butler got his start at the Des Moines Art Center; the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, State University of New York; and Artists Space in New York.
At the Hammer, Butler hosted signature shows, such as “Joan Didion: What She Means” (co-hosted with Hilton Als in 2022-23). Her work has been recognized with the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies, and she was a 2020 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
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