MoMA PS1 announced a new director yesterday, May 8, after almost a year under interim leadership. Connie Butler will now lead the Long Island City institution, the contemporary art outpost of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
More recently, Butler served as Chief Curator of the Hammer Museumposition she held in 2013. Since then, the institution grew up from a small arm of the University of California at Los Angeles to an internationally renowned museum. Prior to that, Butler was chief curator of drawings at MoMA and curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles.
Now Butler is returning to the East Coast, where she will succeed former PS1 director Kate Fowle, who resigned unexpectedly last June. Fowle’s short tenure witnessed a difficult time at the museum – the institution closed for the pandemic, its staff and budget were cut, and protesters denounced the council members’ ties to military contractors and the prison-industrial complex.
In 2010 Butler worked on the third iteration of the recurring exhibition MoMA PS1 Greater New York, which draws from the community of contemporary artists in New York. Four years later, Butler co-curated the fledgling Hammer Museum Made in LA biennale, another series of exhibitions focused on emerging creators and which helped secure the Hammer’s image as an institution focused on supporting local artists.
The Hammer Museum opened in 1990. A 20-year renovation project ended in March, and the institution now holds the third largest collection in Los Angeles. This year, Butler organized Together over timea presentation of works of art from the museum fund which opened its doors next to the recently renovated building.
Butler’s other curatorial projects have largely promoted female artists and feminist activists. At the Hammer Museum, Butler curated exhibitions including Andrea Fraser: Men on the Line (2019), an exploration of men’s relationship to feminism, Adrian Piper: a synthesis of intuitions (2018), a MoMA collaboration that explored the role of the artist in conceptual art, and Marisa Merz: The sky is a big space (2017), the first retrospective of the Italian artist. At MoCA, Butler mounted WACK! : art and the feminist revolution (2007), a landmark exhibit that showcased feminist art and activism from 1965 to 1980.
Butler has since said that she regrets having centered the work of white feminists: “I was trying to do something that was both canonical, but also revisionist,” she said in a 2021 interview for the UCLA Newsroom. “The show had many flaws, and many artists that I now wish were included weren’t.”
Last year, Butler organized Witch hunt at the Hammer Museum. The exhibition featured the work of 16 artists from 13 countries who have broadened the historical feminist lens to include decolonial and queer frameworks in their art, including Minerva Cuevas, Teresa Margolles and Okwui Okpokwasili.
Butler will begin his new role in September.
