The news of Butler’s appointment was first reported by the New York Times.

Butler is among the country’s most respected curators, having held top positions at several important institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, where she was chief curator of drawings from 2006 to 2014.

“Connie Butler is widely known and admired as a trailblazing curator and scholar, as well as a dedicated mentor to rising museum professionals,” MoMA director Glenn Lowry said in a statement. “With her close working relationships with artists, both established and emerging, and her long-standing connections to MoMA and New York, we know she will advance MoMA PS1 in all aspects of its ambitious program. I look forward to working with her again.”

During her tenure at the Hammer Museum, which began in 2013, she was key in significantly raising that institution’s profile, establishing it as one of the city’s most important museums and a place known internationally for mounting cutting-edge exhibitions.

Among her first exhibitions at the Hammer was the 2014 edition of the Made in L.A. biennial, which included a range of artists who are now well-established, including Wu Tsang, Samara Golden, Tala Madani, Clarissa Tossin, and A.L. Steiner. A major survey for Mark Bradford, his first institutional solo show in his hometown, followed. Other curatorial credits at the museum include solo outings for Marisa Merz, Lari Pittman, and Andrea Fraser, as well as a landmark retrospective for Adrian Piper, which was co-organized MoMA.

At MoMA, her two most important exhibitions were the first major US surveys for Lygia Clark (2014) and Marlene Dumas (2009–09), as well as “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century” (2010). She served on the curatorial team of the 2010 edition of Greater New York at PS1.

Prior to joining MoMA, Butler was a longtime curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Her most well-known exhibition during her tenure there was 2007’s groundbreaking “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” which traveled to PS1 in 2008. That exhibition is widely credited with rewriting art history through a feminist lens, examining how activism helped shape the art-making of numerous women artists between 1965 and 1980. The exhibition’s catalogue, which includes short biographies for each of the 140 artists included, is now considered an essential text.

“MoMA PS1 has a remarkable and important history, a rich and exciting present-day community of staff, artists, and audiences, and a potential that seems unlimited,” Butler said in a statement. “I am honored to have been chosen to lead this institution, and I look forward to working with the Board and staff as we continue its mission serving the New York and Queens communities, as well as the broader international network of artists who represent MoMA PS1’s incredible past and future.”

In a statement, MoMA PS1 board chair Sarah Arison said, “Thanks to our in-depth search process, we welcome a new Director who deeply understands MoMA PS1 and our artist-centric DNA, and will ensure that we remain at the forefront of innovative programming that serves our communities locally and internationally.”

Butler fills a gap at PS1 that has been left open for nearly a year. Fowle, who recently joined Hauser & With as senior curatorial director, had been at the helm for fewer than three years when she left the museum. The details of her departure were not disclosed at the time.

His memory of the ambulance forms the crux of a pivotal sculpture that debuts as part of the exhibition. In Ambulancia (2020), from 2022–23, a skeletal mattress spring, emergency siren light, loudspeaker, metal chairs, and wheelbarrow form a hauntingly zoomorphic figure in Lind-Ramos’s signature style, a contemporary blend of Arte Povera aesthetics and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora that utilizes organic and found objects from his community in Loíza, Puerto Rico.

“I was in New York at the beginning of the pandemic, as scared as everybody else by all of the sirens,” said Lind-Ramos, who had been stranded in an East Harlem rental after his March 2020 debut exhibition at New York’s Marlborough Gallery. “I connected that experience as a child and thought, Wow, what can I do with this?”

At the time, the idea of the ambulance led to “very apocalyptic” thinking. “Is this the end of human beings?” he asked himself. “A lot of people were dying. They didn’t have time to bury them separately. It’s interesting because nobody talks about that now. They say you forget—but I don’t forget.”

The plastic tubing that could have been seen as an airway, now seems to represent the respirator that keeps Ambulancia’s intubated creature alive. Each item that Lind-Ramos adds to his assemblage sculptures holds distinct significance: the metal chairs and mattress skeleton symbolize people who have died from COVID; the wheelbarrow signifies lifting thousands of dead bodies. 

For the past fifteen months, shortly after winning a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in September 2021, Lind-Ramos has been driven to filter the intensely personal yet communal experience of the pandemic through these new sculptures that would incorporate dichotomies known all too well in Puerto Rican folklore: humor and healing, hope and dread. During a visit two Decembers ago, his studio in Loíza—a town of Afrodescendientes on the Island’s northeastern coast, where the artist was born and raised—was cluttered with mops, brooms, metal buckets, and an outdoor hose awaiting their role in a future work; they are now the backbone ofAlegoría de una obsesión (Allegory of an Obsession), also made for the PS1 show.

When we spoke in his studio, the first weeks of lockdown were still quite raw and sensory. He described a sense of abject fear—his two daughters worked as front-line nurses—as well as his early obsession with cleaning supplies like Clorox (the inspiration for Alegoría de una obsesión). Lind-Ramos relied on sketches he made during his Harlem lockdown to channel the particular deep, emotional upheaval and collective trauma during that time. It’s all part of his approach of showcasing the sublimeand the terrifying side by side. “I think about the forces of nature. They are terrible,” he said. “But at the same time, you are like ‘Wow.’ It’s a little romantic.”  

One of Lind-Ramos’s most well-known sculptures is Maria-Maria (2019), first exhibited at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. That piece comprised, among other things, lacquered coconuts and FEMA tarps, which five years after Hurricane Maria are still ubiquitous across Puerto Rico. A work started around the same time Baño de María (Bain-marie/The Cleansing), 2018-2022, features in the PS1 survey. It’s arguably the show’s most compelling: FEMA tarps and burlap shape a totem-deity, who is surrounded by a five-point aureole, decked with tambourines, trumpets, and hammers that invoke deafening gale force winds alongside the majesty of Puerto Rico’s oceans and mangroves. 

As a sculptor, Lind-Ramos relies on the intimacy of memory and the universality of calamity to assemble his art from everyday materials—a TV, a shovel, found shoes, roofing, and dried tree trunks—to fantastical, contemplative effect. His works responding to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria capture the devastating inequalities and ravaging effects on the archipelago and simultaneously conjure the aesthetic joys of Puerto Rican life and resilience. In Baño de María, the swirling, atmospheric shapes that radiate from the tambourines reflect rising water temperatures that ultimately create powerful hurricanes, as they follow the pathways once used in the transatlantic slave trade route, traveling from West Africa to the Caribbean.

“I start with an idea based on an experience, and then there are objects that relate to that experience,” Lind-Ramos tells me in front of the finished sculptures. “Maybe I have one object that generates everything, but I don’t have the others. I make a drawing or a sketch. Then something happens. Objects start coming. I start finding them. I start making them.”

The current survey, titled “El Viejo Griot — Una historia de todos nosotros,” takes its name from a discarded boat found on a nearby beach that friends carried back to his studio. It now forms the center of a new work, El Viejo Griot (2022–23) that is surrounded by cargo sacks, stamped with dates of monumental events in Puerto Rican and Antillean history: 1804, the Haitian Revolution; 1898, the US invasion of Puerto Rico; 1952, approval of the Puerto Rican constitution by Congress; 2017, Hurricane Maria.

El Viejo Griot harkens centuries of fishing as economic survival and migrations to Puerto Rico from nearby islands, embodying the exhibition’s themes of recovery and survival, which feel, for much of humanity, especially dire. 

“I’m talking from a very specific place,” Lind-Ramos said, “but at the same time, I am talking about the human spirit because we are all migrants or have somebody in our past who has moved.”

Curated by Ruba Katrib and Yasmil Raymond, working in collaboration with Jody Graf and Kari Rittenbach, the show is set to be one of the biggest exhibitions PS1 has devoted to a single artist in the past few years, with more than 100 works in multiple mediums. It will open October 12 and run through March 2024.

For many attending the exhibition, the main attraction will be the works that involve user participation. Arguably Tiravanija’s most famous piece, untitled 1990 (pad thai), first staged that year at New York’s Paula Allen Gallery, involves the preparation of the namesake dish by a team of workers and the consumption of the meal by attendees; it is considered a key artwork from its era. That work is one of the five interactive pieces that will appear in the PS1 show, where they will sit on a stage, as though they were theatrical productions.

“Rirkrit is thinking of them as plays,” Katrib said in a phone conversation. “There will be actors, but they will be breaking the fourth wall. It’s maintaining the ethos of participating.”

She added, “It’s going to be really interesting—so many of these works have become mythologized.”

Katrib pointed out that those early food-oriented performances produced objects, and indeed, the PS1 show will also feature sculptures, works on paper, ephemera, films, and other works made in modes more familiar to those who attend galleries. These works address topics as diverse as the news cycle, diasporas, and the very notion of art history itself.

There are, however, aspects of Tiravanija’s expansive practice that cannot fit in a gallery, no matter its size. Tiravanija, who was born in Buenos Aires and is now based between New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai, is a cofounder of the Land Foundation, which promotes farming in Thailand, and he was a co-initiator in 2006 in the artist-led Gallery VER in Bangkok. He’s also taught art for many years at Columbia University.

Katrib promised that these activities would make their way into the show’s catalogue, one of the most significant tomes devoted to Tiravanija, and said that the exhibition would provide a prime moment demonstrating how the artist has spurred on others around him.

“Working on the show, it’s been so interesting to see how Rirkrit has been so influential,” Katrib said. “He’s really impacted so many artists, and his work is so referential—he’s a student of art history, so his work is about the history of modern and contemporary art practices. [The way] he’s deployed those references has impacted so many artists. His ideas and the ways he approaches his works have really seeped into the broader consciousness.”

In an email sent to the museum’s staff on Friday afternoon that was reviewed by ARTnews, Fowle did not give a reason for her unexpected departure, saying only that she would continue to organize the institution’s highly anticipated exhibition of Daniel Lind-Ramos due to open in April 2023.

Fowle said that the museum’s interim leadership would consist of deputy director Jose Ortiz, director of curatorial affairs Ruba Katrib, and director of external affairs Molly Kurzius, along with the museum’s board chair Sarah Arison and MoMA director Glenn Lowry.

Located in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City, MoMA PS1 is an affiliated institution with the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Prior to joining PS1 in 2019, Fowle had served as the chief curator of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow for six years, where she helped open its Rem Koolhaas–designed building in 2015, launched the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, and became known for an innovative program of exhibitions that included showings for artists like Louise Bourgeois, Olga Chernysheva, Urs Fischer, Rashid Johnson, Irina Korina, Robert Longo, Anri Sala, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Fowle took over the role of director at PS1 in September 2019, which had been left vacant for over a year after Klaus Biesenbach left to run the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. (He has since left that position.)

Fowle’s departure from PS1 is unexpected. A New York Times profile of her, published in April, touted her “priorities as the new leader of the Long Island City institution: to strengthen the connection with its neighbors in Western Queens and North Brooklyn, to make PS1 a hub of community activity through art, to lean into the museum’s progressive roots and to give the institution an identity distinct from MoMA’s.”

Just weeks ago, PS1 hosted a major gala, its first since the onset of the pandemic, at its home, a former school in Long Island City. The glitzy affair was attended by Mayor Eric Adams, collector and former MoMA PS1 board chair Agnes Gund, and artists Rashid Johnson and Deana Lawson.

Another recent departure from PS1 is Hannah Howe, director of development since February 2021, who left to become deputy chief development officer for individual giving at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the message to staff, Fowle wrote, “I want you to know that I have deep respect and admiration for you all, and that I am incredibly proud of all the work we have achieved together. You are the dream team and I am forever in awe of the kindness, dedication, and care that you show to each other, to me, and to all the artists and their communities and partners that we work with. I very much look forward to seeing how our artist-centered and community-driven vision evolves.”

In a statement sent to ARTnews, Arison said, “Kate Fowle is a talented curator and director who has led MoMA PS1 through the intense challenges of the last three years to become a more resilient and financially stable institution. Kate has piloted innovative models of community engagement, diversified the uses of the building and its courtyard to connect more deeply with Queens and New York communities, and strengthened PS1’s commitment and role as an artist-centric institution. We all have so much admiration and respect for Kate—including her incredible work ethic and artistic vision. We are very grateful for everything she has contributed to PS1, and the work she has done to build a bright future for the institution. We wish Kate continued success in the next role she chooses.”

Ford’s visit occured shortly after her father’s death, and experiencing these sites both heightened and undercut her grief. She began to write her way through her mourning, later editing and revising her texts in a poetry class. Fragments of that text (HOW CONFUSING THE GRAVES ARE HERE, reads one stray line) were laser cut onto stiff sheets of colored, translucent acrylic, then arranged in layers and affixed, mural-like, to the walls of MoMA PS1, forming two wall works titled Hollywood Cemetery (I The Fool) and Friendship Cemetery (The Wise), both 2021. In their arresting, graphic compositions and evocative wordplay, these large-scale pieces resemble something between familiar architecture—the mounting and incisions recalling errant graffiti on a city wall—and private diary, testifying to Ford’s nimble public presentation of intimate feelings.

View of Raque Ford’s 2017 exhibitoin “Carolyn” at Shoot the Lobster, New York.

Fashioned from industrial, prefabricated, and salvaged materials, Ford’s painterly installations meld abstraction with an eclectic writing practice. In earlier installations, Ford underscored her background in painting and printmaking: for her 2017 solo exhibition “Carolyn” at Shoot the Lobster in New York, the artist added expressive, colorful marks to clear acrylic panels, and suspended them from the gallery ceiling with chunky chains. But over the last year, she’s tightened her focus while paring down her materials and techniques, highlighting and clarifying the relationship between form and content. In these most recent installations, the artist allows text, color, and material to breathe, coexisting in layered compositions that reveal a process both playful and structured in equal measure.

Uncanny juxtapositions are the key to Ford’s aesthetic sensibility. The artist, who studied painting as an undergraduate at Pratt and Received an MFA from Rutgers in 2013, is attentive to how materiality intersects with light and space to co-produce an experience for and with the viewer—an aesthetic out look that owes much to the legacy of Minimalism. Ford troubles that lineage, soaring past its associations of brute masculinity by incorporating an abstracted combination of  hand-made markings, color, and cut-out shapes.

Onto her shiny plexiglass surfaces, Ford inscribes, stamps, and carves words and phrases from an ever-expanding lexicon derived from song lyrics, fan letters to pop stars, and scraps of eavesdropped and misremembered conversations that the artist saves as notes on her phone. Everything is copy; every inscription is a reinscription; every discarded edge can be repurposed to fit a new shape. Such are the ideas that drive Ford’s forthcoming solo exhibition at Greene Naftali in March 2022, which will build on and reinterpret the themes explored in both Friendship and Hollywood Cemetery.

What is most compelling about Ford’s practice is not the naked confessionalism of her textual incisions, but how her layered, laser-cut letters portend precision yet still invite misreading and open interpretation. If every act of writing is undertaken as an attempt to communicate, what always lurks beneath is the threat of misunderstanding, even in the most direct language. Ford’s porous installations and diaristic phrasings may at first blush present an open-ended relatability, but the rigid materiality of her work nevertheless functions as a necessary psychological barrier between viewer and artist. That protective distance allows Ford’s intimate admissions to remain alluring and alive.

In the more than 100 works by 47 artists included, several loose focuses emerge: interests in land rights, passionate desires to represent the under-represented, and shared fascination with artists of the past who have been cast to the margins of history. There are many dead and under-known artists included among a good deal of young up-and-comers, too. Spanning generations, continents, and movements, the artists in this show demonstrate a canny ability to depict the worlds they inhabit with specificity and dynamism.

Below, a look at eight standouts from the show.

Greater New York is one of the most important recurring institutional exhibitions held in the city, alongside the New Museum Triennial (which will also open in October) and the Whitney Biennial. Typically held once every five years, Greater New York focuses artists based in the New York area.

To oversee this year’s edition, PS1 enlisted Ruba Katrib, a curator at the Long Island City museum. She will curate the exhibition alongside independent curator Serubiri Moses, who was on the team behind the 2018 Berlin Biennale. They worked in collaboration with PS1 director Kate Fowle and Inés Katzenstein, curator of Latin American art and director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at the Museum of Modern Art.

This edition of Greater New York had been in the works well before the pandemic began. But, as with other biennial-style shows, the exhibition was shaped by Covid as well.

“The pandemic stopped things for a long time, so when we got back to work on the exhibition, we were all changed—everything was changed,” Katrib said in an interview. “This is an exhibition that’s not necessarily such a direct response to what’s happened, but has grown out of it.”

This year’s Greater New York is due to include a spread of artists ranging in age. Nine of them are deceased, while the youngest artist in the show, Kristi Cavataro, is not yet 30 years old.

Lesser-known artists from eras past are set to appear alongside up-and-comers. Ahmed Morsi, who’s associated with the Egyptian art scene of the mid-20th century, will be included, as will photographer Hiram Maristany, who began shooting Spanish Harlem in the 1960s, and painter E’wao Kagoshima, whose unclassifiable work has earned him a loyal set of followers. So, too, will younger artists on the rise, among them Hadi Fallahpisheh, Doreen Garner, Sean-Kierre Lyons, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Kayode Ojo.

Works in two modes—surrealism and documentary—will mingle throughout the show. Katrib said these two styles may seem opposed, but here, they will complement each other. Additionally, the exhibition will emphasize the city’s intergenerational art scene.

“Artists are looking at their elders. Older generations of artists are sustained by younger generations of artists,” Katrib said. “Networks of artists are operating across space but also through time.”

The 2021 Greater New York artist list follows below.

Yuji Agematsu (b. 1956)
Nadia Ayari (b. 1981)
BlackMass Publishing (est. 2018)
Diane Burns (1957–2006)
Kristi Cavataro (b. 1992)
Curtis Cuffie (1955–2002)
Hadi Fallahpisheh (b. 1987)
Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989)
Raque Ford (b. 1986)
Luis Frangella (1944–1990)
Dolores Furtado (b. 1977)
Julio Galán (1958–2006)
Doreen Garner (b. 1986)
Emilie Louise Gossiaux (b. 1989)
Robin Graubard (b. 1951)
Milford Graves (1941–2021)
Bettina Grossman (b. 1928)
Avijit Halder (b. 1988)
Bill Hayden (b. 1984)
Steffani Jemison (b. 1981)
G. Peter Jemison (b. 1945)
E’wao Kagoshima (b. 1945)
Marie Karlberg (b. 1985)
Matthew Langan-Peck (b. 1988)
Las Nietas de Nonó (est. 2011)
Athena LaTocha (b. 1969)
Carolyn Lazard (b. 1987)
Sean-Kierre Lyons (b. 1991)
Hiram Maristany (b. 1945)
Servane Mary (b. 1972)
Rosemary Mayer (1943–2014)
Alan Michelson (b. 1953)
Ahmed Morsi (b. 1930)
Nicolas Moufarrege (1947–1985)
Marilyn Nance (b. 1953)
Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990)
Tammy Nguyen (b. 1984)
Shelley Niro (b. 1954)
Kayode Ojo (b. 1990)
Paulina Peavy (1901–1999)
Freya Powell (b. 1983)
Raha Raissnia (b. 1968)
Andy Robert (b. 1984)
Shanzhai Lyric (est. 2015)
Regina Vater (b. 1943)
Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (b. 1980)
Lachell Workman (b. 1989)

News

John W. Hinckley Jr., the man who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan, has been granted permission to display his painting, photographs, and other artwork. [The New York Times]

After 10 years as chair of the MoMA PS1 board, Agnes Gund will step down from her post to become the chair of PS1’s diversity, equity, and inclusion committee. [ARTnews]

As coronavirus cases surge across Europe, museums in France and Germany are again ordered to close their doors until further notice. [ARTnews]

Fine Arts Paris and Art Cologne, both slated to take place in November, have cancelled their 2020 editions amid a second round of lockdown measures. [The Art Newspaper]

Market

This second edition of Art Basel’s online digital fair, “OVR,” saw slower sales on its first days compared to the first edition. [ARTnews]

In Photos

Tyler Mitchell photographed Vogue’s latest cover star, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. [Vogue]

The Met’s Costume Institute has been lauded for its new show, a celebration of the museum’s 150th anniversary. Read a review, and see images of the exhibition’s most sumptuous pieces, here. [The New York Times]

Artists & Art

A spate of exhibitions is telling a different story of Minimalism, one that foregrounds the female artists who worked in, and around, the movement. [Artsy]

At the Forbes Pigment Collection at the Harvard Art Museums, conservators, preservationists, and historian’s have the chance to analyze the precise paint colors used by history’s most famous painters. [NPR]

Three new, post-lockdown exhibitions at the Queens Museum consider the institution’s role in the life of its multiethnic neighborhood. [The New York Times]

Gund, who is also a board member at PS1’s sister institution, the Museum of Modern Art, is one of the most high-profile benefactors of her kind in the United States. The subject of a documentary by her daughter that was released earlier this year, Gund made headlines in 2017 when she sold a $165 million Roy Lichtenstein painting to form the Art for Justice Fund, which supports initiatives focused on mass incarceration, including PS1’s current exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”

“I am honored to take on this role as Chair of the PS1 Board of Directors, and humbled to continue Aggie Gund’s legacy of inspirational leadership,” Arison said in a statement.

Arison is the founder of National YoungArts Foundation, a grant-making organization that offers funds to emerging artists, and she serves as president of the American Ballet Theater and the chair of the education committee at the Brooklyn Museum, as well as a trustee at MoMA, Lincoln Center, and other institutions. Her position as co–vice chair will be filled by Australian collector and art patron Simon Mordant, who previously served as chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney.

The news comes roughly six months after PS1 said it was undergoing its “most serious financial crisis” ever. In April, the museum furloughed around 70 percent of its workforce. A PS1 spokesperson told ARTnews in September that most of the 47 furloughed workers were brought back, though 18 of them had been laid off.

In the announcement about the board changes, PS1 said it had launched a $5 million fund intended to achieve what it called “long-term fiscal sustainability.” Almost all of those funds have already been raised, with Gund having put up $2.5 million toward the creation of a new program focused on the museum’s relations with its surrounding community.

In a statement, PS1 director Kate Fowle said, “With the support of our Board and generous donors, we aspire to transform PS1 into a generative contemporary art institution that sits at the intersection of local allyship and global connectivity.”

“The many impacts of the pandemic—on the museum, on the city, and on all of us—have moved me to think about the next chapters in my work and my life, and I have decided to step down as Chief Curator at the end of the year,” Eleey wrote in an emailed letter to PS1 staff that was sent to ARTnews.

In his email, Eleey said he would continue to work on solo presentations for Deana Lawson and Gregg Bordowitz. Neither exhibition has been dated yet.

“I want to thank Peter Eleey for his decade of strong contributions to PS1,” Kate Fowle, PS1’s director, wrote in an email to PS1’s staff. “During his tenure, he has brought to life more than 40 exhibitions, many of which are an indelible part of our institutional history.”

Those curatorial credits include solo shows for artists such as Simon Denny, James Lee Byars, Ian Cheng, Henry Taylor, and more, as well as the recent group show “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011” (co-organized with Ruba Katrib), which focused on how art-making in Iraq and beyond was impacted by U.S. intervention in the region. Prior to working at PS1, Eleey had been a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

In 2018, Eleey was the subject of a discrimination complaint from Nikki Columbus, who claimed that he had offered her the role of curator of performance art in 2017, only to see the position allegedly taken away from her after she told Eleey that she had recently had a baby. In 2019, Columbus settled the claim for an undisclosed sum.

Eleey’s departure comes as PS1, like many other U.S. institutions, experiences turmoil resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic. In April, facing what Fowle called the “most serious financial crisis” at the museum ever, the museum furloughed more than 70 percent of its workforce. A PS1 representative said that the “majority” of the 47 furloughed workers were brought back, though 18 were laid off. PS1 reopened to the public earlier this month.