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.

Paul Sietsema, Carriage Painting, 2018.

COURTESY MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY

When New York Times art critic Ken Johnson went to review Paul Sietsema’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, what he found there—in a David Lynch-ian moment—was himself. One of Sietsema’s black ink drawings was of a page of the Times that contained a review bearing Johnson’s byline. Sietsema had also reproduced a review by Johnson’s colleague Roberta Smith of Sietsema’s own exhibition “Empire,” at the Whitney Museum in 2003 (his New York debut, which included drawings, a model of Clement Greenberg’s New York apartment based on photographs from a 1964 issue of Vogue, and a film based around that model, would appeal, she wrote, to those who “like their Conceptual art funky yet obscure”). This kind of archival mise en abyme is Sietsema’s stock in trade. He is interested in relics, whether that means newspapers, or rotary telephones or Abstract Expressionism or the entire modernist project. Born in Los Angeles in 1968, he returned to his hometown in 2011 after a stint in Berlin; it was there that he had begun to develop an interest in using euros, and other relics of 20th-century history, as the basis for a new series of hyper-realistic paintings. Connie Butler, now chief curator at the Hammer Museum, was the organizer of Sietsema’s 2010 MoMA exhibition. She recently visited Sietsema’s studio in L.A.’s Highland Park neighborhood to talk with him about his most recent works, including those paintings incorporating currency, which were on view this past fall at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.

Connie Butler: Your recent collages are actually paintings of torn euros, layered on found, anonymous abstractions.

Paul Sietsema: I start by looking at paintings listed on auction aggregators, mostly European sites that compile information about objects from many smaller auction houses throughout Europe. They’re relatively inexpensive paintings, 100 [euros] to 200 euros at most, made by painters [who] are either unknown or, perhaps, forgotten. I think of it as starting at the end of a production process, evaluating finished paintings based on composition, color, and perhaps what style they most adhere to. It is an activity that I enjoy and think of as assembling alternative histories of painting, of art, by inserting work that has fallen by the wayside back into the mainstream, or whatever it is that I am a part of, by using these found paintings as carriers for my actions. This is part of the reason I call them “Carriage” paintings, they are works that are asked to do additional work, but maintain their autonomy to varying degrees.

CB: You are actually buying them?

PS: Yes. I bid, sometimes by phone, often using online intermediary platforms, and have the paintings mailed to me. There’s a lot of negotiating, trying to get the people who work at the auction house to put the paintings in a box and walk them down to the local post office. The canvases are mostly between 30 and 100 years old, the newest one in the show was painted in the 1990s. I suppose I’m interested in the idea that being a bit more in the spotlight or in a certain part of the art world is partially chance, and that my own current position showing in a gallery in [New York’s] Chelsea [art district] allows me to influence this chance and insert some of these artists into a scene they weren’t a part of before. I bring these paintings into my studio, there’s an action that’s performed on them by me and then they’re entered into a new kind of circulation. . . .

I’m also thinking about displacement of value. Most of the found paintings have an expressionist style to them. Expressionism and abstraction in painting are sort of like the new Doric column. While they were once sociopolitically complex and activated (and thereby functional) gestures, they are at this point symbols, for value, and for art itself, in a generalized sense. They seem quite classical and for the most part have become the decor they were working so strongly to resist in the beginning. Once I’ve chosen a painting I then enact a kind of rote image-making on top of it. I’ve always loved currencies—I collected them when I was a child, coins as well. They seemed doubly magic since they had a value based on their denomination and then a secondary value based on their rarity or historical importance. This redundancy I think is similar to the redundancy of an image-based object being painted, copied, as a painting. There is the value inherent in the image and then the value inherent in the painting, and the activity of painting which, perhaps in its rarity as a hand-based activity, also gains value. The engraving marks of the currency are like road maps of how to lay down the paint strokes, like painting by numbers, the painting paints itself. Of course, currency itself is produced in high numbers, large editions perhaps, and then there are copies made, counterfeit versions, passed off as the real thing to steal the value represented. An abstract painting these days is perhaps the same thing, a counterfeit object that steals the value of the original movement. The term “carriage,” in financial terms, refers to the value of an entity that is carried forward in time.

As my own expressionist gesture to build the images, I tear the currency into strips, 5 pound notes, 500 euro notes, releasing the value of the object. The torn strips are dropped onto a scanner bed and captured in a digital file that I use for the paintings.

CB: You continue to return to a European history of modernist abstract painting, and you are preoccupied with the idea of composition.

PS: I am playing the part of the retro formalist when I lay the imagery from the digital files of the torn euros over the found abstract compositions. I like to get into the headspace I imagine I’d be in if I were making an abstract painting: a pool of purple here, a swoosh of pink there, a dab or two of turquoise placed just so. Intuitively, I’d be balancing elements of the composition, perhaps trading this off with pure gesture, keeping one eye on light and dark relationships, weight, those types of things. But instead of doing this primal, perhaps existential, perhaps purely formal activity, relying entirely on intuition, I start with a painting that isn’t mine but that I have chosen, or rather shopped for. On top of that I choose an object that represents itself which, like a flag, is what currency does; the way it presents itself graphically is completely inseparable from its function as an object. The paintings are chosen with the colors and designs of the currencies in mind, and vice versa. Although the currency is being painted, copied really, by hand, which creates a physical link to the hand of the painter of the found painting, neither the currency nor the painting are bringing much to the table on their own. They each have a kind of vacuous quality to them, and the formalism, the intuitive decisions that lock them together also has a vacuous quality—it is not something that has value on its own. The work itself for me is never quite in the object but hangs perhaps just outside it, a juncture of the energies that find their vectors elsewhere throughout the object. I suppose this aspect might separate me from formalist/materialist painters a bit, but I do think all good painting now has an activated aspect to it, a conceptual element, and that not all good painters are using paint.

Paul Sietsema, Yellow Phone Painting; White Phone Painting; and Pink Phone Painting; all 2018.

COURTESY MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY

CB: Your telephone panels are exquisite and strange painting objects. They remind me of the beautiful green monochrome from your last show in Los Angeles. The phones are nearly photorealistic but through a sense of touch, with cold, yet almost erotically charged, finished surfaces.

PS: Well, first off I should mention I’m not interested in the rotary phones in any kind of retro or nostalgic way. I do remember them although when I touch them now I don’t have much of a tactile memory for them. I remember them as lines of communication—it seemed the cord itself reached to the other person—a slightly enhanced sense of physical connection and intimacy perhaps, compared to the iPhone. There was also the “nobody’s home” aspect of them, a sort of spatialized absence: with an unanswered phone, you knew a bell was ringing in space somewhere. And the busy signal. Was the phone off the hook? Were they purposely shutting out the world? Or was someone just on the phone for a long time? The absence or presence of the body on the receiving end, the embrace of the answered or the rejection of the unanswered phone, all felt a bit more emotional, physical, attached to a body and a person. If you think of painting as an even more heightened version of these kinds of connections, the object of communication from which the person cannot be fully separated, whose body lingers, is tethered somehow to the object: I felt for the painting as interlocutor—as open or closed portal, as object of relay for ideas or phenomenological passages, the phone image provided a redundancy that could replace the aura of painting with its mute double—reinforcing what an image is in the first place.

CB: Not to fetishize the making, but describe how they are constructed. It’s almost a reverse forensic process.

PS: I first gut the telephones (the loss of weight, I think, shifts them closer to being an image, and their functionality is removed). They have strange organic contents; gooey gels surround some of the wires, etc. This takes some time and makes a mess. I then wipe them clean with isopropyl alcohol so the paint will stick to them. This massaging and tracing of the surfaces of the object is always quite enjoyable—possibly in part because they are designed to interface with a body and of course have bodies themselves. I then mix enamel paint to match the color of the phone and pour it over the phone. The paint must be dripped very slowly and evenly over the phone to allow the object to render itself well when the paint is dry. The paint cures and shrinks over a few weeks in the studio, things from the studio sometimes get stuck in the paint—bits of dust or lint or hair, small air bubbles pop or remain. After the paint coating has cured, the phones are propped up and shot in 3/4 lightning, the standard for modeling objects in space, for drawing but also in the digital realm. I then use the same paint to render the image from the image file, by hand. Layers of the paint are built up on the canvas first, to give me a good surface. This creates air bubbles, makes texture, traps lint and dust and hair, the same things as in the image that will be painted on this surface so that there is a fairly even mix of rendered and real bumps with highlight and shadow. This for me has the effect of destabilizing what is real, and also destabilizing what is painted. It pulls both into a more ambiguous, floating space.

CB: There’s something about analog knowledge and process in the paintings.

PS: Maybe 20 or so years ago I read an article about the future of digital information storage that stuck with me. It talked about quantum computing as a model for storage, that certain types of ambiguity could be used to nestle bits of information together in a smaller amount of space. I guess I think about these telephone paintings in a similar way, the various ways I think about them perhaps expands/multiplies the surface area of their experience or engagement for me. And I like that the phone is basically one cell, a bottle without a message in it, with an expanded surface area of engagement.

CB: As is usual for you in recent years, a film is a pendant to each body of work. Can you talk about Encre Chine from 2012 that was projected as part of your Matthew Marks show?

PS: When I was living in Berlin I came across a type of printing ink that was very thick and kind of iridescent. I thought it was very beautiful. I bought a tub of it and started coating things that I was going to throw away in my Berlin studio. The coated objects would dry out and start cracking and get dusty and then I would throw them away. When I was back in L.A. I came across one of the tubs of black ink I’d brought back with me. I started coating things I hadn’t used in a while. I liked the ink when it was still wet before it dried and got dusty and cracked. So I shot the things that I was coating with my Bolex and made a film. I liked the redundancy of the surfaces of the objects that were coated in the ink, being caught up again in another field of goo, the emulsion of the 16mm film stock. I was thinking about objects losing their function after they’ve been coated. How this is like an image and also something that couldn’t exist outside of the record of it. I was photographing it to stabilize it. The objects I was coating, including my mother’s camera which she’d given me decades ago so I could document my work, were being turned into images of a kind, having their function removed, and also being defined by their surface. But the surface was defined by the shine of the ink and its iridescence rather than the objects underneath it. The objects were related to things I was doing in the studio: a hammer and chisel I used to break images of sailboats out of their frames, and some of the frame pieces and mats that were the leftover husks of that activity.

As for the camera I’d had for so long, it seemed like a nice way for it to be stopped and also continue, and for it to become an image even though it’s an image-producing device, which I guess the tub of ink with the brushes was also, a working tool and an iconic image that connotes work—a symbol for painting.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of ARTnews on page 38 under the title “Busy Signals.”

Detail of the Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976–), by Judith F. Baca, showing 500,00 Mexican Americans Deported.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SPARC, VENICE, CALIFORNIA

To get the best view of the painted mural known as the Great Wall of Los Angeles, you have to step through some underbrush, peek over a chain-link fence, and angle your gaze downward over the expanse of the Tujunga Wash. The mural stretches for half a mile along the concrete wall of the Wash, a tributary of the concrete-lined Los Angeles River. Tucked away in Valley Glen, a community in the San Fernando Valley, far from the glitz of Hollywood, the mural is an exuberantly colored sequence of images that begins with prehistoric times and ends in the 1950s.

The sweeping narrative—the Wall’s official title is “The History of California”—opens with mastodons and saber-toothed tigers looking across a river, and across time, at a camp of Chumash Indians, some of California’s earliest residents. It moves through the arrival of the Spanish (seen from the indigenous point of view), the mass deportation of Mexican Americans during the Great Depression, the turning back of the transatlantic liner St. Louis, loaded with European Jewish refugees during World War II, and the anguish wrought on Japanese Americans by internment.

It shows achievements: there’s the physician and researcher Charles Drew, who protested against the racial segregation of blood donors, transfusing a black patient. Mrs. Laws, a black activist forgotten by history who protested racially restrictive housing covenants in South Central L.A., holds a bold sign above her head: WE FIGHT FASCISM ABROAD & AT HOME. It also shows terror: a grim-looking, red-and-white-clothed Joe McCarthy tumbles film industry figures (as well as their cameras and typewriters) into a wastebasket for their alleged Communist sympathies. A female figure suggesting Rosie the Riveter is sucked into a black-and-white television, toward suburbia. Family members isolated from each other as the twists and turns of L.A.’s multiplying freeways ensnare their bodies illustrates the impact that the construction of highway interchanges had on the city’s eastside communities, bifurcating historically Chicano neighborhoods. By the time the wall reaches its conclusion, Martin Luther King Jr. sits in the back of a bus gazing at a smiling Rosa Parks, seated in the front row.

Judith F. Baca photographed at SPARC, Venice, California.

MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS

Peering along the Wall’s expanse, it quickly becomes obvious that the history presented there is from the perspective of those who have not always been recognized—women, minorities, queer people. Still, it helps to look at it with the woman who conceived it 40 years ago, Chicana artist Judith F. Baca, who, at 70, is an electric presence in rose-tinted sunglasses. Before completing her designs, Baca told me as we stood in front of the Wall on a typical L.A. December day (60 degrees and sunny), she consulted with people who lived in the San Fernando Valley; she wanted to hear their stories. To execute the mural, she enlisted hundreds of teenagers, many of them drawn from L.A.’s juvenile justice program. They completed it in 1983.

Artists have always worked with assistants—some with small armies of them—but Baca didn’t fit into any paradigm the art world recognized. Back in the ’70s, “they called me a teacher, a social worker, even a gang member—everything but an artist,” she said. “This is not what art did. It did not intervene in social spaces, mitigating problems that these kids were facing. It was so foreign to the arts to be engaged in social justice action or transformative action within a community.”

These days, however, Baca’s reception is changing. This September, her work will feature in three exhibitions, including one about her innovations on the Great Wall, in the highly anticipated third edition of the Getty Foundation’s “Pacific Standard Time,” an initiative of more than 70 exhibitions and programs from San Diego to Santa Barbara. This version carries the theme “L.A./L.A.,” an acronym that, depending on whom you talk to, stands for any combination of Los Angeles, Latin America, and Latino art. And UCLA ’s Chicano Studies Research Center, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota Press, is publishing a monograph on Baca by scholar Anna Indych-López, as part of the center’s “A Ver” (Let’s See) series, a 15-year effort to provide scholarship on Latinx artists. Once sun faded and water damaged, the Great Wall got a makeover in 2011, with Baca restoring it to its original vibrant colors, and plans are in the works to add a viewing bridge, designed by wHY Architecture, across the channel, and to extend the mural’s narrative through the 1970s, and beyond.

A few days after visiting the Wall, Baca and I met at the Venice offices of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), the mural-making organization she cofounded in 1976, and has been the artistic director of since 1981. “I think the art world has had kind of an uneasy relationship with me,” she told me, sitting on a sofa surrounded by sketches and studies for murals. “But now . . . I’m resurrected, right?”

Detail of Judith F. Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976–), showing an alternative history of the 1950s: Farewell to Rosie the Riveter, Development of Suburbia, the Red Scare & McCarthyism, Division of the Barrios & Chavez Ravine. Click for full detail.

MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN, ARTNEWS/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SPARC, VENICE, CALIFORNIA

A defining moment in Baca’s thinking about art came in 1969, early in her career. The first in her family to graduate from college, she had just completed her B.F.A. that year at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where she trained as a minimalist painter. (She had briefly left CSUN to become an illustrator, making isometric drawings for the aerospace manufacturer Lockheed.) At her graduation party, Baca’s grandmother, who had migrated from Mexico to the United States during the Mexican Revolution, asked the new grad what she planned to do with her life, and Baca proudly pulled out her thesis portfolio. After flipping through it, her grandmother asked, “Well, what’s it for?” Baca decided then and there that she wanted to make art that would strike a chord with the people she’d grown up with—Chicanos in Watts and Pacoima, a neighborhood a few miles north of the Great Wall. “For Judy,” said Indych-López, “I think high modernism was not something to necessarily reject, but to adapt to her own uses.”

After graduation, Baca became a high school art teacher within the Archdiocese of Los Angeles at Bishop Alemany High School; after less than a year she was fired for attending protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (as were a number of nuns). Without a job, she enrolled in a citywide program funded by a federal initiative that gave underemployed artists and educators opportunities to teach. Administered through L.A.’s Parks and Recreation Department, the program had her teach art to young children and senior citizens in parks. Because she was a Chicana, she was assigned to East L.A.

During breaks between her morning and evening classes, she continued to protest against the war, this time as part of the Chicano Moratorium, a coalition of politically minded Mexican-American antiwar groups marching against the high death tolls of Chicano men in Vietnam. Baca also started talking with local teenagers, some of them involved in gangs, who hung around playing dominoes in the parks where she taught. Independent of her work through the city program, she enlisted 20 of these teens, some from rival gangs, to create a mural in the Hollenbeck Park bandshell. Mi Abuelita, completed in 1970, shows a Mexican grandmother whose outstretched arms curve with the walls of the bandshell, embracing whomever stands in it.

Judith F. Baca in front of her painting Tres Generaciones (1973), showing a portrait of her grandmother, ca. 1986.

COURTESY SPARC ARCHIVE (SPARCINLA.ORG)

With Mi Abuelita, Baca introduced a model, one that she would refine over the course of her career, for working within communities to develop imagery for public artworks. Her process begins with meetings within the community to source stories. She then consults oral historians, scholars, cultural ethnographers, and, when she can, people who have lived through the events to be depicted. “She has a way of making people step out of their own struggles into a larger understanding of what constitutes a life,” her longtime friend, the artist Amalia Mesa-Bains told me.

Around this same time, Baca was going through another kind of awakening. She was in the middle of a divorce from her husband of four years, and would later come out as a lesbian. She moved to an apartment complex in Venice and joined her landlord’s consciousness-raising group. She would eventually become involved with the feminist community around the Woman’s Building, an education and exhibition space near MacArthur Park that took the Virginia Woolf essay “A Room of One’s Own” as its guiding principle. Among her cohorts at the Woman’s Building, she was one of the few women of color; among the members of L.A.’s Chicano art movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s, she was one of the few women. “People don’t take women artists seriously, especially a Mexican woman artist, as I am,” she would write in an artist’s statement in 1978.

It was this aspect of Baca’s life that particularly interested curator Connie Butler, who included maquettes for two of Baca’s murals in her landmark 2007 exhibition “WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “I was very interested in re-narrating the history of feminist art, particularly in L.A., which has largely been understood as a history of middle-class white women artists,” Butler said. “I knew it was more diverse than that. It’s important to think about the Chicana artists and what their relationship had been to the organized feminist art practice in L.A., and that led me straightaway to Judy.” In 1976 Baca organized a group exhibition at the Woman’s Building, titled “Las Chicanas: Venas de la Mujer,” one of the first exhibitions solely of Chicana artists. “She was a fireball who matured into a powerhouse,” said Judy Chicago, the cofounder of the Woman’s Building who would later advise on the Great Wall.

These days, intersectionality—a term coined by critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw as a way to understand multiple social identities that people hold of themselves—is an accepted lens through which to address discrimination and oppression, but back in the 1970s it wasn’t. Baca was a woman, a Chicana, and a lesbian, at a time when the first two were thought of as mutually exclusive identities, and the third was not discussed at all. “Judy calls herself a bridge,” Indych-López said, “a bridge between the two worlds: the feminism of the Woman’s Building and the Chicano community. She was unique in being a prominent member of both worlds . . . She claimed a space for women of color within feminism, and a space for feminism within Chicano and Chicana art.”

Detail of Judith F. Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976–), showing “Mrs. Laws,” fighting against racially restrictive housing covenants in South Central Los Angeles.

MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN, ARTNEWS/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SPARC, VENICE, CALIFORNIA

In the wake of Mi Abuelita’s success, Baca’s boss at the Parks and Recreation Department promoted her to director of Eastside Murals, and she began creating various works across the historically Latino eastern portion of L.A. By 1974 she took her work citywide, founding the Citywide Mural Project, L.A.’s first public mural program, which organized the creation of murals across each of the city’s council districts by sourcing artists and assistants from the neighborhood. Within two years, though, Baca was worried about losing funding for the program, afraid that the city would either pull the money or begin censoring some of the murals’ grittier images, such as scenes of immigration and police brutality.

So Baca struck out on her own, cofounding, with artist and educator Christina Schlesinger and filmmaker Donna Deitch, the Social and Public Art Resource Center. The organization’s mandate was to fund community-based public art projects throughout L.A.’s marginalized areas. Its name, which Schlesinger suggested, comes from the title of an essay, “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire,” by Mao Zedong. In short, it would make murals, or, as Baca is fond of calling them, “sites of public memory.”

Two years earlier, the Army Corps of Engineers had approached Baca about beautifying the Tujunga Wash, which had been paved with concrete in the 1930s, in an attempt to tame the flood-prone L.A. River. Under the auspices of SPARC, Baca set to work thinking about designs for a mural there.

“What I saw [looking at the Wash] was this metaphor: the hundreds of miles of concrete conduits were scars [on] the land,” she wrote in an essay. “I recalled the scars I had seen on a young man’s body in a Los Angeles barrio. Fernando, my friend and mentee, had suffered multiple stab wounds in East Los Angeles’s gang warfare. . . . Together, we began to design transformative tattoos in an effort to make the ugly marks into something powerful and beautiful. . . . Overlooking the channel, I saw a relationship between the scars on his body and the scars on this land. I dreamed of a tattoo on the scar where the river once ran.”

It was a large canvas to work with but she was undeterred. “She can be very intimidating to people because of the scale at which she works and thinks,” said Mesa-Bains. “One of the elements of her work is her capacity to think beyond the normal realm that artists think in.”

In the summer of 1976, Baca recruited nine other artists and 80 kids to paint the first 1,000 feet of the mural. Her mantra was, “If you can disappear a river, how much easier is it to disappear the history of a people?” The wall would take five sweltering summers and 400 artists and youths to complete. “I was dealing with the concreted river, and making a relationship between the stories of the people and the destruction of the river. I mean that metaphorically and spiritually. It was the recovery of the river and the recovery of our stories,” Baca said.

The Great Wall may not be one of L.A.’s most visible—or visited—monuments, but it is in many ways a landmark. The Wall “is tied to Baca’s sense of a non-seamless history—of a history of ruptures, and struggle,” Indych-López said. “She’s not trying to replace one canon with another, but in a way she’s visualizing history as a process of contestation in and of itself.”

Judith F. Baca, World Wall: Balance, 1990.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SPARC, VENICE, CALIFORNIA

For SPARC, the Great Wall—“a kind of blueprint for how to work with massive groups of people,” as Indych-López thinks of it—was a launchpad for its Great Walls Unlimited: Neighborhood Pride mural program. Between 1988 and 2002, SPARC and Baca, again working with some backing from local government but still independent, cooperated with nearly 100 artists to produce 105 murals. She made her mark on the city.

“If you spend any time in L.A. and have any awareness at all of the Chicano history here, she is one of the iconic people that you just know about,” Butler, the “WACK!” curator, said. “Even though she has less visibility maybe in the contemporary mainstream art world, she’s an iconic figure within that history here.”

Baca and SPARC have since expanded into projects like The World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear, a multinational mural effort. The piece, which has traveled nationally as well as internationally, includes contributions from artists in Finland, Russia, Canada, and Mexico, as well as an Israeli-Palestinian collaboration. Typically installed in a semicircle, the center panel of the portable mural, titled Balance, depicts two golden hands encircling a man’s head, which rises above a deep blue stretch of water, surrounded by lush vegetation. The image is meant to evoke the harmony that can be achieved when humans respect the land they live on, and all of its inhabitants.

In 2001 Baca made a mural for the Denver International Airport, La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra, that traces the migration story of her grandparents, who fled their ranch in the countryside of Chihuahua when Pancho Villa’s troops pillaged it. They moved northward: first, to Ciudad Juárez to stay with family. Fearing reprisal, they crossed into El Paso, Texas, the Mexican Ellis Island, and eventually settled in a railroad town in Colorado called La Junta, or the junction. “The opportunity to tell that story in that region became really important for my family,” Baca said. “I had told everybody else’s story, but I hadn’t done ours. I took it as an opportunity . . . to tell the migration story, which was not only my family’s story, but the story of hundreds of thousands of Mexican people who came during that time to Colorado and the Denver region.”

With murals like the one in Denver, Baca has been pushing the form into new territory, using digital tools that fuse painting with scans of photographs. Today, SPARC is at the forefront of research to advance muralism through its affiliation with UCLA, where Baca is a professor. In her digital mural lab, on-site at SPARC, she and her students have developed new substrates to preserve murals, as well as new ways to create ones, such as “painting” on-screen and fabricating them with a high-res printer. “Not to take advantage of all the tools and materials [available] keeps you from being an artist of your time,” Baca said. She added that, with these new tools, “beyond my ability to climb scaffolding, I might be able to continue making large-scale works.”

Judith F. Baca, La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra, 2011, installation view, at the Denver International Airport.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SPARC, VENICE, CALIFORNIA

Although she’s best known as a muralist, two of the “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions to include Baca’s work this fall will feature non-collaborative pieces. The first show, “The U.S.–Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility,” co-curated by Lowery Stokes Sims and Ana Elena Mallet for the Craft & Folk Museum in Los Angeles, will include Baca’s The Pancho Trinity (1993), three Styrofoam sculptures of stereotyped dozing Mexican men (“panchos” in the lingo of the art-for-tourists trade) painted with scenes—a graveyard, a chain-link fence—depicting the perils faced by Mexican migrants. The work, as Sims writes in her essay for the show, “reinvents the iconic kitschy image of the ‘sleeping Mexican’ to comment on the struggle of immigrant groups.”

For “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985” at the Hammer Museum, co-curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta have chosen Las Tres Marias, a three-panel painting that includes two life-size portraits of Chicana women with a mirror between them. When the viewer looks at the mirror, he or she becomes the third Maria. “For me, this piece has all the trademarks of Judy Baca as an artist,” said Fajardo-Hill. “She has always fought for social justice through art. From that point of view, this work does something powerful that creates visibility and makes a huge statement for women, Chicana women in particular.”

But it is Baca’s community-based work that is certain to be what she is remembered for, though it has always presented difficulties for reproduction and is market-resistant. “The bulk of her work has always been in the public sector, and you can’t put a price on that; it can’t be sold or bartered or exchanged or put into some warehouse in Geneva,” Mesa-Bains said. “It’s on a scale that cannot be acquired.”

“She stands alone,” Mesa-Bains added, “the power of her production, the scale and scope of its reach, and ultimately, the social justice impact that she’s had.”

Last September, I ran into Baca at a Ford Foundation symposium in Manhattan on “U.S. Latinx Arts Futures.” During a discussion of Ph.D. programs in Latinx art history, the speaker moved to a slide to show the names of 16 Ph.D. candidates nationwide. “Those are my students,” Baca marveled under her breath, recognizing five of the names as her students at UCLA, in the Expressive Arts Track of the Chicano/a Studies Ph.D. program. Like the Visual and Public Art Institute she created at California State University, Monterey Bay, the Expressive Arts Track bridges Baca’s public work with her teaching.

Baca shows no signs of slowing down. In January, she was a speaker at the Women’s March Los Angeles, protesting the inauguration of Donald J. Trump. “The work I’m doing in the digital lab is now really gearing up to resist Trump,” she told me days before the march. “We’re preparing. SPARC has been, from its very beginning, an organization that has provided a place for social justice, thought, vision, and civil rights through the arts. I think that’s more important now than ever.”

Maximilíano Durón is a Los Angeles–born reporter and photo editor at ARTnews. He covers artists of color, particularly Latinx/Chicano artists, as well as queer art, digital art, and breaking news in the art world.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of ARTnews on page 72 under the title “Concrete History.”

Gladys Nilsson, By the Pier, 1987.

COURTESY GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

For the third time in two decades, ARTnews approached a cross section of museum directors and curators to opine about one of their favorite subjects: Who are the most underrated artists today, both living and dead?

While the names may have changed, some trends are consistent. Women artists remain vastly overlooked both in terms of their achievements and their market, with Nancy Spero and Joan Semmel cited repeatedly. Artists whose base is peripheral to art-world hubs still suffer from underexposure, such as Mathias Goeritz from Mexico and Brazilian modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral. Native American sculptor Jimmie Durham, who received an underrated-artist nomination in 2000, made the survey again this year—though his current retrospective at the Hammer Museum may help remedy that.

What follow are the considered and uninhibited responses of an authoritative and eclectic group of art world professionals.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-80.

MARCIA BRICKER/COURTESY RONALD FELDMAN FINE ARTS

PAUL C. HA, Director, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts

In thinking about who is underrated, I’d say Helen Frankenthaler, Carolee Schneemann, Alma Thomas, and Anne Truitt all immediately come to mind. They each contributed significantly to the art movements they were part of but are still thought of as part of a second tier, after the men. Frankenthaler and Thomas in Color Field, Schneemann in Conceptual and performance art, and Truitt in Minimalism—they were founding participants and all enormously influential.

Recently, I visited a preview exhibition for a contemporary evening auction. Out of the 65 lots, only four were by women. The female artists included in the auctions over and over are Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, and Cindy Sherman (who all, by the way, absolutely belong in this club). Artists such as Alice Aycock, Lee Bontecou, Elizabeth Catlett, Lee Krasner, Farideh Lashai, Betye Saar, Nancy Spero, and Hannah Wilke, to name a few, belong in the market, and deserve that financial nod recognizing their significance and continued influence.

Kudos to the Metropolitan Museum for championing Nasreen Mohamedi and to the Queens Museum for its Mierle Laderman Ukeles exhibition. Both put their institutional heft behind these two important artists.

Lorraine O’Grady, Untitled (Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Shouts Out Her Poem), 1980-83/2009.

©2016 LORRAINE O’GRADY/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/ COURTESY ALEXANDER GRAY ASSOCIATES, NEW YORK

FRANKLIN SIRMANS, Director, Pérez Art Museum Miami

I think Lorraine O’Grady is incredibly underrated, given the things she’s done in performance and the ongoing examination of photography. And Leandro Erlich and Dario Robleto are the kind of alchemical artists who deserve to be seen in a much bigger light.

CONNIE BUTLER, Chief Curator, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Marisa Merz, now 90, is an artist who is well known in Europe but has never had a one-person exhibition in a U.S. museum until her current retrospective at the Met Breuer. She worked closely with her partner Mario Merz, often putting her own career in the background as she intermittently participated in the larger Arte Povera exhibitions. Mark Grotjahn is another artist in this category—a painter whose reputation has been made in the market but who deserves much greater attention from curators.

Jimmie Durham, whose retrospective is on view at the Hammer through May 7, is an artist little collected in this country, so he’s underrated in terms of the market, but he’s arguably the most influential artist of the 1990s generation. That is a decade full of rediscoveries like this: Anne Chu, Byron Kim, Liz Larner, Alix Pearlstein, Beverly Semmes. These are artists who have been showing regularly but are under the radar in some sense. Other artists just under the radar are Sarah Lucas, Paul Sietsema, and Paul Chan, who has taken himself out of the limelight of international exhibitions but continues to work as a publisher and online activist.

JULIÁN ZUGAZAGOITIA, Director, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City

With immigration so central to the news, I believe reflecting on the time during World War II is relevant, particularly in terms of how exiles from the German modern movements impacted the Americas and had different “landings” that might have determined their appraised value, not their influence. Take Walter Gropius and Josef Albers, both immigrating to the United States and holding teaching positions in preeminent universities. Compare the number of books published about them and the record values for their works with other artists immigrating to Latin American countries where only recent scholarship is bringing those names to international attention such as Gego (Venezuela) and Mathias Goeritz (Mexico). Undeniably, these artists had tremendous impact and influence on the evolution of abstract art, sculpture, and architecture in their respective countries yet are just now benefiting from a more global approach to scholarship.

Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,1978-79.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

EVA RESPINI, Chief Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

I am currently working on an exhibition exploring how the internet has affected visual production, and my research has revealed so many overlooked artists. Many happen to be women working in moving images, an area that hasn’t guaranteed much commercial success. Judith Barry, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Dara Birnbaum, and Gretchen Bender are pioneering thinkers who prefigure much of what we see today on the market as so-called “post-Internet” art. The ICA Boston’s collection has a strength in art by women artists, and I am delighted to see that many of them are slowly getting the accolades they deserve, including Françoise Grossen, Joan Semmel, and Sheila Hicks.

DAN CAMERON, Independent curator, New York

Not surprisingly, nearly all the artists I consider underrated are women: Nalini Malani, Joan Semmel, Doris Salcedo, Hito Steyerl, Sadie Benning, Howardena Pindell, Charlotte Moorman, and Kay Rosen are all artists whose work should be much better known.

Samson Kambalu, Moses (Burning Bush), 2015.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KATE MACGARRY, LONDON

BONNIE CLEARWATER, Director and Chief Curator, NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale

In the underrated category, I would include Malawi-born, London-based artist Samson Kambalu, whose brief silent films are the subject of his first solo U.S. museum exhibition at NSU Art Museum. I have also long admired mid-career artist Rita McBride’s mysterious sculptures of architectural structures, and I find myself consistently drawn to 1970s artist David Haxton, who created minimal sculptures as the subject of his photographs long before Thomas Demand and Sara VanDerBeek. Cuban-born, Miami-based Jorge Pantoja, who has been creating tantalizing, poetic works since he arrived in Miami in the early 1990s, remains at the top of my most underrated list.

GARY TINTEROW, Director, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

I am acutely conscious of the role of fashion in creating taste, and how the only constant is change. In the beginning of the 1930s, the Museum of Modern Art’s founding director, Alfred Barr, predicted that Camille Corot would be as influential in the course of modernism as Paul Cézanne. He made similar predictions regarding André Derain. Ultimately, it is contemporary artists who resuscitate the work of earlier artists—just as Pablo Picasso referred back to Francisco Goya and Goya to Diego Velázquez, so Jasper Johns helps us see Picasso or Cézanne in a new light, and Bruce Nauman and Robert Gober help us understand Johns differently.

Ree Morton, For Kate, 1976.

JOERG LOHSE/COURTESY ALEXANDER AND BONIN, NEW YORK

IAN BERRY, Director, Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York

Terry Adkins and Ree Morton are underrated artists who forged independent paths in their lives as makers. Both made tough decisions and stuck to their principles, continually breaking down their work and reassembling it into something new.

For current masters, Nancy Grossman and Dona Nelson both deserve more attention. The wild abandon with which they push their ideas and objects is destabilizing and affirms art’s unique power. Also in this category for me are Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Joan Snyder, Polly Apfelbaum, and Nayland Blake—always pushing, always re-creating, always challenging.

It’s hard to cite younger artists as underrated so early in their careers, but I would note Johannes VanDerBeek, Suzanne Bocanegra, Kamau Amu Patton, and Michael Oatman as deserving more looks.

Irwin Kremen, And Still Is, 2001.

©IRWIN KREMEN/COURTESY BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE

LAWRENCE RINDER, Director and Chief Curator, University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California

Although interest in abstraction is undergoing a resurgence, many highly deserving artists still haven’t enjoyed adequate attention, including Frederick Hammersley, whose work runs the gamut from haunting portraiture and hard-edge abstraction to algorithmic computer-generated compositions; Fanny Sanín, a senior Colombian painter of subtle color geometries; Irwin Kremen, a Black Mountain College–schooled maker of exquisite small collages of found paper fragments; Ralph Coburn, who married concrete abstraction with participatory aesthetics years before others like Hélio Oiticica began exploring this fertile terrain; Rosie Lee Tompkins, whose quilts capture the essential hum and pulse of being; Frederick Kiesler, a visionary 20th-century architect and artist whose “galaxies”—multipart irregularly shaped canvases of the 1940s and ’50s—anticipate by many decades later experiments in “deconstructive” painting; Nathaniel Dorsky, a San Francisco–based filmmaker who deserves to be considered one of the greatest abstract artists of our time; Charles Howard, who bridged biomorphism and Precisionism to create strange, jewel-like paintings; and Todd Bura, a young artist whose paintings somehow manage to break new ground in the exploration of painterly form.

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One day this kid . . .), 1990.

COURTESY THE ESTATE OF DAVID WOJNAROWICZ AND P.P.O.W GALLERY, NEW YORK/WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK, PURCHASE WITH FUNDS FROM THE PRINT COMMITTEE

DAVID BRESLIN, Curator and Director of the Collection, Whitney Museum, New York

The greatness of David Wojnarowicz is finally coming to light, due in no small part to Cynthia Carr’s magisterial 2012 biography. But I suspect most still know him more as a figure, myth, or even stand-in for the 1980s, activism, or the AIDS crisis than as the singular artist he was—formally daring, stylistically promiscuous, proudly queer, and inextricably political.

Like Wojnarowicz, Nancy Spero was an advocate and activist—for women and the voiceless; against the war in Vietnam and the “shadow” ones in Central and South America—in addition to being an artist steeped both in history and allegory. We need to see more of her work.

MICHAEL DARLING, Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

There are so many female artists who are under-recognized such as Mary Heilmann and Ellen Berkenblit. I’m still shocked at how low their prices are compared to those of their male peers and how few shows they get in comparison. There are some corners of the 1960s that could still use more exploration. I think Alex Hay is an amazing Pop artist who is mostly unknown by a broader public but was right there in the whole heyday of New York 1960s pop culture. Another underdog is the Canadian conceptual artist Iain Baxter&. I don’t see any commercial galleries taking him on, but he’s a giant hiding in plain sight.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits (detail), 1980.

PETER VANDERWARKER/© 2016 PEABODY ESSEX MUSEUM

LISA FREIMAN, Director, Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond

Every day I encounter artists who deserve more attention. Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons is an Afro-Cuban artist who emigrated to the United States in the early 1990s, when the first wave of Cuban artists post-Revolution began traveling and exhibiting internationally. Her installations poetically unpack her Black Cuban family’s history and its interconnectedness with the African slave trade and forced labor on sugar plantations. Like so many artists I admire, William Lamson, a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary conceptual artist, isn’t represented by a gallery. Lamson investigates charged natural sites, ranging from New York’s East River to Chile’s Atacama terrain.

Arnold Kemp won a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship and is now the Dean of Graduate Studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. His paintings, drawings, and sculptures intelligently engage abstraction, personal history, memory, and popular culture. While his work has been included in numerous exhibitions, publications, and collections, Kemp deserves deeper scholarly consideration.

Medardo Rosso, Jewish Boy, 1892-94.

COURTESY PETER FREEMAN, INC. NEW YORK AND PARIS

GARY GARRELS, Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The Pulitzer Arts Foundation recently presented an overview of the Italian modernist Medardo Rosso, a crucial figure for modern and contemporary sculpture, very under-recognized. One of the great Brazilian modernist painters and almost unknown in the United States is Tarsila do Amaral. She is a stunning, haunting painter who should be included in any history of modern painting. Often artists who are not part of movements or follow distinctly personal styles are left with marginal recognition. Two singular postwar American artists who are relatively under-recognized are Richard Artschwager and sculptor Christopher Wilmarth. Painting by three contemporary American women artists who engage figure and subject but maintain taut formal structure are Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Catherine Murphy, and Monica Majoli.

TINA KUKIELSKI, Executive Director, Art21, New York

There are countless women artists whose work I admire who could be considered still under-recognized: Gertrude Abercrombie, Lee Godie, Barbara Kasten, Gladys Nilsson, Christina Ramberg, Suellen Rocca, Barbara Rossi, Diane Simpson, and Nancy Spero, to name but a few.

In general, self-taught art still suffers in the underappreciated category including the awe-inspiring work of Susan Te Kahurangi King, Emma Kunz, and Guo Fengyi.

Also shocking to me is that Adam Curtis is not better known and appreciated outside the U.K. as the incredible documentary filmmaker and artist that he is.

Guido Cagnacci, The Repentant Magdalene, ca. 1660−63.

NORTON SIMON ART FOUNDATION, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

XAVIER F. SALOMON, Chief Curator, Frick Collection, New York

Over the past two years I have grown very fond of Guido Cagnacci, a 17th-century painter from Romagna. He is an eccentric and wonderful painter who should be better known by an international public. For me, he is an artist who should be ranked as high as the Carracci, Guercino, and Guido Reni. The more I think about Caravaggio, the more I think that, out of all the 17th-century painters we think of, he is the most overrated and loved for all the wrong reasons. The greatest painters of that century are Velázquez, Peter Paul Rubens, and Nicolas Poussin, all infinitely superior to Caravaggio. He is a very histrionic painter and one who easily impresses a modern public with his cunning compositions. I often wish there were an embargo on exhibitions and publications on Caravaggio.

Hilarie M. Sheets, a longtime ARTnews contributing editor, also writes regularly for the New York Times, the Art Newspaper, Art+Auction, and W, among other publications.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of ARTnews on page 60 under the title “Hidden Lights.”

Two years later, Holte organized Made in L.A. 2014 alongside the museum’s new chief curator Connie Butler (assisted by Emily Gonzalez), and though the format improved, the question still remained. And in its persistence lies an answer: no, Los Angeles probably doesn’t need a regionally focused survey exhibition every two years. Synopsizing the city in this way has not yet produced an exhibition greater than the sum of its parts. And to be fair, how could it?

With a total of 35 artists participating, Made in L.A. 2014 was tighter than its predecessor, in which 60 artists spanned five venues around town. Tighter and tidier. What the show could not escape was how democratic it felt. It was very Californian, very inclusive, very PC. What it reminded me of more than anything else was school. A school is not a dishonorable institution, but it’s rarely a transgressive one. This wasn’t always the case, particularly here. Southern California’s mythos as an art center is largely steeped in its golden age of art schools, the 1970s and ’80s. Since then, the dynamic between teacher and student has crystallized into the correlative categories of underrepresented and emerging artists, respectively, which Los Angeles establishments are obsessed with reifying through programs that emphasize the inclusion of underdogs to the exclusion of big shots.

The core problem with Made in L.A. was not in omissions; with the exception of Gabriel Kuri and maybe one or two others, internationally established artists of all kinds were not present, so it was difficult to name individuals sorely missed. It was that, overall, it felt like a meta-MFA show. This speaks nothing of the quality of the work, i.e., student versus professional, but of how the exhibiting artists were grouped circumstantially, by where they live and work, instead of by a more directed means.

Some works channeled the positive dimensions of art school. One of the most well integrated artist-working-in-situ-during-a-biennial pieces I have seen was Piero Golia’s The Comedy of Craft (Act 1: Carving George Washington’s Nose), 2014. It’s an eyesore: as one walks down the corridor that joins the two primary upstairs galleries, massive chunks of cut polystyrene foam began to appear as if a glacier had dropped crumbs. An entire span of the hall became Golia’s borderless studio, and while you might have caught him or his assistants fashioning these foam blocks into a life-size replica of Washington’s nose on Mount Rushmore, you just as easily might not have. This wasn’t a performance scripted for museum opening hours; it was an occupation around the clock, but one that came to life only on the artist’s schedule.

Another piece humming with collegiate self-indulgence was ex-con Jennifer Moon’s insane installation, which, yes, included rainbows on the walls and a spirit animal diorama within a sculptural egg. But more compelling was her magnum opus of exhaustive interpersonal engineering on the wall: a many-thousand-word, quantitative and qualitative flow chart chronicling her actual conversion of a stranger into her monogamous partner. It details every bump, real or imagined, along the way.

These were not necessarily the best works in the show, but they were the most generously unwieldy. The standouts were subtler: Kuri’s granite sculptures, in which cigarette butts were stuffed in the stones’ rounded seams, lining the same outdoor hallways as Golia’s work, and especially Ricky Swallow’s suite of “Object Studies,” small bronze sculptures cast from cardboard, rubber bands and other humble materials worked into curious compositions recalling modernist design.

In between there was a sea of A and B students. In the painting class there’s Lecia Dole-Recio with her painted and cut-paper triangles, Max Maslansky’s bedsheets painted in Easter-hued acrylics according to vintage porn stills, and Marcia Hafif’s off-monochromatic squares that are ever so slightly tinted black. Video was proportionally represented with Mariah Garnett’s docu-essay-poem tracing the existential economies of ex-soldiers who become stuntmen, Judy Fiskin’s old-school elegy to her mother and her worldly belongings, and Wu Tsang’s A day in the life of bliss, a new two-channel work in which the performance artist boychild plays a CK1-friendly protagonist on one screen, whose narrative she kinetically interprets on the other.

While there’s a number of promising statements contained within Made in L.A. 2014, the show itself failed to make one of its own. 

These include Public Fiction, the alternative space overseen by curator-designer Lauren Mackler; Los Angeles Museum of Art (LAMOA), the bedroom-sized museum artist Alice Könitz built behind her Eagle Rock studio; the artist-run radio station KCHUNG; the studio of choreographer Jmy James Kidd; and the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, represented by curator David Frantz’s show about late painter and performer Tony Greene.

The decision to fold in these venues reflects Holte and Butler’s main interest: not to try to represent any one vision of Los Angeles, but, in Butler’s words, to explore the specific texture of the community here.

Butler, who was still chief drawings curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art when she agreed to collaborate with Holte on “Made in L.A. 2014,” at first assumed she would be staying in New York, flying back and forth to do studio visits. But she announced in May 2013 that she would return to L.A.—she previously worked at this city’s Museum of Contemporary Art—as the Hammer’s new chief curator. She recently spoke with A.i.A. at the museum about the approach she and Holte took to organizing the biennial.

CATHERINE WAGLEY Did the idea of including in the show exhibition venues like Public Fiction or Jmy James Kidd’s studio come about as you were doing studio visits or did you know all along it was what you wanted?

CONNIE BUTLER It definitely happened as we were making studio visits. It evolved out of thinking about the structure of the community in Los Angeles, a place where you don’t have as much of the commercial gallery framework that really structures a place like New York. We were interested in Jmy as an artist and as a person gathering artists around her. She’s got this bartering program—

WAGLEY Right—people make donations to the free boutique or free bar as the price of admission when they come to events she hosts. Visitors can also take items away from the boutique or have drinks from the bar.

BUTLER There’s a kind of currency and economy about what people contribute to her studio, what they can take from it, how they can use it. We didn’t necessarily know she was going to make a physical space at the museum, but I think she is one of those choreographers who’s really thinking about how dance can work in the museum. And I’m really interested in that.

WAGLEY Was it visits with other artists that led you to Public Fiction?

BUTLER I met Lauren a year and a half ago, when I was working with curatorial students at USC. They were interested in her space as a curatorial model. I just thought, “If we want to capture some of the most interesting up-and-coming talent and thinking in this city, she’s one of those people. Why shouldn’t she be in the show just because she happens to be more a curator than an artist?”

WAGLEY Lauren really does have a certain aesthetic that shapes what she does, though, as does Alice Könitz.

BUTLER They do, and I think we loved Alice’s own aesthetic in her work and we also loved this project where she’s supporting the work of other artists as an extension of her own practice. We didn’t ask her for her work, but what she’s exhibiting is kind of a synthesis of [Könitz’s own work and the Los Angeles Museum of Art in the form of] gorgeous sculptural objects she’s made as stand-ins for her museum.

WAGLEY In your catalogue essay, you write about how artist-run spaces like these didn’t exist in the same way when you were here, 10 years ago.

BUTLER Of course, there are always [alternative venues],  but in the early 2000s, the market was looking so intensely at Los Angeles. So you had young artists taking their work straight to galleries. It seemed like there was less of that artist-run activity at that point. Whereas now—and it’s not just in Los Angeles—somehow, when the market’s at its most crazy and its most conservative, and there’s so much money in it, you have artists turning away from it.

WAGLEY Talking to [artist-dancer duo] Gerard and Kelly, Jmy James Kidd, and even Lauren Mackler, you see that they’re trying to figure out ways to sustain what they’re doing outside the market.

BUTLER The Hammer is a place that wants to be and considers itself artist-centric, whatever that means, so bringing in spaces and being a little bit more experimental about the parameters of what the biennial could include made sense. Both Michael and I like the idea of opening up even our own authorship. Even though I hope the show has a kind of cohesion, at the same time we liked loosening up the edges.

WAGLEY There’s often boosterism involved in shows like this. But it doesn’t feel like this show is so much about Los Angeles.

BUTLER It’s really not. It is a biennial that happens to be here. L.A. is very like Berlin in this way—so many artists are coming here to practice that there isn’t any one thing that represents the place. The regionalism has more to do with why people choose to be here and the particular texture and character of the community. There’s something about its size and relationship to the commercial world that makes it very supportive. People have been really supportive of this show. But maybe once it’s been done another 10 times, they’ll start to be like they are with the Whitney Biennial, anticipating how they’re going to criticize it.

WAGLEY Both you and Michael mention Mike Kelley in your essays in the exhibition catalog—was he someone you talked about together?

BUTLER When we started working on this show his death had just happened, and I was working on the installation of the Mike Kelley show in New York, so as we embarked, the question of what Los Angeles is without Mike Kelley was huge. He and Lari Pittman were the first L.A. artists to have a huge international presence, and now with Mike gone and the art world itself being more international, it feels to me like something really important will shift. There’s no silver lining to Mike’s passing, but now maybe there’s a little more room to look at people outside of just that generation that so dominated the late 1980s and early ’90s. I’ve been thinking a lot about Daniel Joseph Martinez, who was a teacher of Juan Capistrán [an artist in the biennial] at [U.C.] Irvine. What’s the impact of someone like Daniel Martinez, who’s Mike Kelley’s age and a really brilliant artist working this whole time? With Norman Yonemoto’s passing, what about Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s work? And with [curator] Karin Higa’s passing, I’ve thought a lot about the kind of Japanese-American, Asian-American identity in this city. What’s that incredibly important legacy that hasn’t been well represented in the institutions here?

Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum has announced the name of the 35 artists who will be participating in its second Made in L.A. biennial. Focusing on artists working in the Los Angeles area, the exhibition will run June 15-Sept. 7.

The Hammer’s chief curator, Connie Butler, organized Made in L.A. 2014 with independent curator Michael Ned Holte. Featuring painting, installation, video, sculpture, photography and performance by emerging and under-known artists, much of it created specifically for the show, Made in L.A. will take up the entirety of the museum. A catalogue and a series of free public programs will accompany the exhibition.

In a press release, Hammer director Annie Philbin expressed confidence in the city’s artistic community’s ability to maintain an ongoing biennial series: “Michael and Connie have visited hundreds of studios and will tell you they have only scratched the surface—there is so much going on here.”

The full list of participating artists is below:

Juan Capistrán

Danielle Dean

Harry Dodge

Lecia Dole-Recio

Kim Fisher

Judy Fiskin

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess and Michael Frimkess

Mariah Garnett

Gerard & Kelly

Samara Golden

Piero Golia

Tony Greene: Amid Voluptuous Calm

Marcia Hafif

Channing Hansen

Jibade-Khalil Huffman

James Kidd Studio

Barry Johnston

KCHUNG

Devin Kenny

Gabriel Kuri

Caitlin Lonegan

Los Angeles Museum of Art

Tala Madani

Max Maslansky

Emily Mast

Jennifer Moon

Brian O’Connell

Harsh Patel

Marina Pinsky

Public Fiction

Sarah Rara

A.L. Steiner

Ricky Swallow

Clarissa Tossin

Wu Tsang

Butler will be returning to Los Angeles from New York, where she has served as the chief curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art since 2006. She was previously a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, from 1996 to 2006, where she organized “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.” More recently, at MoMA, she collaborated with the Hammer’s Allegra Pesenti on the exhibition “Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone 1955-1972.”

“Obviously, going from a MoMA to a Hammer is leaving an institution with a long and venerable history, and one of a certain size, to one that is lean and lighter on its feet,” Butler told A.i.A. in a phone conversation. “And I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with the Hammer curatorial team, and with [Hammer director] Ann Philbin, whom I’ve admired for a long time.”

“I’m excited at the chance to work with a very young collection and to shape the direction of that collection,” she added. “And I’m happy to have a broader palette in terms of collecting beyond drawings.”

Moshayedi has organized exhibitions and overseen the production of artists’ work as an associate curator at the Gallery at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in downtown L.A. He previously served as curator at LAXART and contributing editor for Bidoun.

Butler and Moshayedi will both be working to expand the Hammer’s newest collection, the Hammer Contemporary Collection (established in 2005), as well as planning the museum’s exhibitions and residency programs. Both are scheduled to start work in July.

Curator Christophe Cherix will be head of a new super-department of some 74,000 objects at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Cherix will head the new department of prints and drawings, which will merge the museum’s existing department of prints and illustrated books with the department of drawings, effective July 1. He has been chief curator in the department of prints and illustrated books at the museum since 2010 after coming to the department as a curator in 2007.

Cherix has spearheaded a number of cross-department acquisitions, including the Seth Siegelaub collection (2010) and the Daled collection (2011). The 2009 acquisition of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus collection was one significant joint acquisition between museum departments that indicated a softening of inter-disciplinary boundaries.

The museum has also announced that Connie Butler, who has been chief curator of drawings since 2006, is returning to Los Angeles, where she was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art for 10 years before joining MoMA. Back in L.A., she will co-organize the biennial of Los Angeles art at the UCLA Hammer Museum and serve as a visiting professor in the art and curatorial practices program at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of the Arts. She will continue to work on exhibitions including an upcoming retrospective of Lygia Clark and a Mike Kelley retrospective, coming to MoMA PS1 this fall.

Butler has organized numerous exhibitions at the museum, including “Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave” (2009) and “Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972” (2012-13). She also co-curated the 2010 edition of “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1.

Art in America’s critics write their way through the best of 2011. We’ve asked leaders in the fine arts to highlight the top works in their areas of special focus. Stephen Maine is a Brooklyn-based painter, critic, curator and teacher, and a frequent contributor to this magazine.

Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants 2006–2009, edited and translated by Lee Ambrozy, MIT Press.
The latest addition to MIT’s “Writing Art” series collects just a fraction of the Chinese artist-activist’s 2,700 blog posts on such topics as architecture, photography, Warhol, the Beijing Olympics, Chinese cultural life, and the excesses and abuses of his country’s Communist Party. Ai attributes the deaths of thousands of children during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake to “tofu-dreg” construction, and his criticism of the government’s handling of that disaster led officials to shut down his blog-presaging heavier-handed forms of harassment to follow. Ambrozy’s nimble translation and abundant annotations illuminate Ai’s indignation in the face of institutionalized corruption and incompetence.

Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks, Phaidon
A posse of internationally known curators—Daniel Birnbaum, Connie Butler, Suzanne Cotter, Bice Curiger, Okwui Enwezor, Massimiliano Gioni, Bob Nickas, Hans Ulrich Obrist—each select 25 works through which they chart the landscape of recent art, year by year since 1986. At a time when the concept of the “masterpiece” is marginalized, the book perversely makes the case for the individual work of art as a means to understand what artists worldwide are up to. A platform for the contributors’ ideas and enthusiasms, the book also foregrounds the trend of professional curators’ advocacy for specific artists, an aspect of the curatorial activity that, for better or worse, has become explicit in the last generation or so.

Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, Robin Clark, ed., Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the University of California Press.
Of the many superb books related to “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980,” the ongoing extravaganza initiated by the Getty and involving some 60 venues in Southern California, Phenomenal is among the most elegant. Its format is modest, compact; the design is appropriately austere; the plates are beautiful. Essays by Michael Auping, Dawna Schuld, Stephanie Hanor and Adrian Kohn address the Light and Space artists’ relationship to architecture, perception, materials, and the language used by both artists and commentators to describe and analyze this resolutely nonlinguistic work.

de Kooning: A Retrospective, John Elderfield with Lauren Mahony, Jennifer Field, Delphine Huisinga, Jim Coddington and Susan F. Lake, edited by David Frankel, MoMA.
This volume magnifies and clarifies the great exhibition’s many facets, honoring the complexity of de Kooning’s historical presence and his work’s lasting fascination. Short essays examine various aspects of nine distinct phases of his career; to each phase is appended a detailed chronology and an analysis of materials and methods used in a single representative canvas. In his idiosyncratic syntax, de Kooning once described himself as a “slipping glimpser,” referring to his preference for the incomplete or provisional information that a dynamic viewpoint affords, and this teeming book aptly provides slipping glimpses of one of the giants of 20th-century painting.

Larry Fink: The Vanities: Hollywood Parties 2000-2009, Schirmer/Mosel
While shooting Oscar parties for Vanity Fair, Fink trades his slouchy street clothes, and per this book’s introduction, “dons a tux and moves like a shadow” among the stars, their entourages and anonymous hangers-on. Skewering the unlovely strivers of Tinseltown might seem as hard as throwing rocks at a barn, but there is method to Fink’s mischief: ignored by the players, he captures a nobody’s-eye-view of high-stakes ritual bonding that speaks volumes about the dynamics of status and the fear of exclusion. As the Hollywood of the book’s title denotes an industry, not a location, many of the photos collected here—black-and-white, printed in tritone—were shot in New York, too.

Permanent Error, Pieter Hugo, Prestel.
This haunting photo essay was shot in an enormous dump outside of Accra, Ghana’s capital, where young men drug themselves while earning a meager living extracting bits of metal from discarded electronic devices “donated” from developed countries around the world. Seen in a show last fall at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, this recent body of work by the young South African combines portraits of the hollow-eyed scavengers displaying the tool of their trade-a long stick-with sweeping images of the smoldering landscape. The hellish district, on the outskirts of the Agbogbloshie slum, may be the final resting place of obsolete monitors, modems and motherboards, but there is absolutely nothing cyber about this space.

Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance, Aperture.
The work of this Japanese photographer always looks better in book form, where, printed one per page and carefully sequenced, her images—delicate, intimate, reticent but never cryptic—an be absorbed slowly, and her tougher, more jolting photos can better deliver their punch. Illuminance gathers work from the last 15 years: a gangly spider; a hole in a rock, filled with water; a doll-like blossom, washed out by flash; a dead, bloodied deer by the side of the road. The book is cinematic in its steady buildup of images that create a mood, and then break it. This kind of thing is hard to sustain, but just when Kawauchi’s approach to the poetic snapshot starts to look familiar, it takes a turn for the weird.

The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936–1951, Mason Klein and Catherine Evans, The Jewish Museum, The Columbus Museum of Art, and Yale University Press.
Should the socially concerned photographer be true to his subject, or to his medium? Before Robert Frank’s The Americans changed photography forever by reconciling the exigencies of commentary and art, members of the Photo League—Sid Grossman, Rebecca Lepkoff, Ruth Orkin and dozens of others—wrestled with their priorities. The resulting tensions tore the League apart (the McCarthy-era Red Scare only piled on the hurt), and the issue of aestheticizing social pathology remains unresolved in the diverse work of Katy Grannan, Edward Burtynsky, and the Detroit “ruins porn” of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

Redheaded Peckerwood, Christian Patterson, Mack
Headlights in the distance, an ancient phone booth, a bonfire at the base of a leafless tree, a stuffed toy poodle pummeled beyond recognition, a narrow stairway to a filthy storm cellar. Dread emerges from the photos marshaled here, which relate, at times obliquely, to the teenaged serial murderers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. Some are original, in saturated, at times ghastly color; others, in flash-soaked black-and-white, are forensic photos (or nice simulations) of the aftermath of the gun-crazy couple’s 1958 killing spree through Nebraska and Wyoming. Patterson reproduces a few archival materials such as notes and letters, but the project’s psychological heft comes from the narrative associations that flow from the images.

Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy, David Robbins, Pork Salad Press
Comedic art, like comedic acting, is harder to pull off than it seems. Timing is everything. Artist and writer David Robbins dates the start of concrete comedy, “the comedy of doing rather than saying,” in the early 20th century in the work of German comedian Kurt Valentin, who made expressly comic objects for display. Duchamp, Warhol, Manzoni and Maurizio Cattelan are among the artists in the lineage, along with performers like the Ramones and Frank Zappa, who adopted comic personas, and occasional comedians such as Coco Chanel, who designed haute fashions based on maid’s uniforms. The author’s unassuming, slightly crackpottish voice and enthusiasm for his subject—and it does seem to be his subject, with little other literature around-makes for an engrossing read.

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, Menil Foundation
The catalogue for the exhibition seen last summer at the Metropolitan Museum (now in San Francisco, and soon in Houston) is an impressive attempt at what was surely a daunting challenge-conveying in book form Serra’s success at facilitating via drawing “a disjunctive experience of the architecture” that is its context. Installation views are helpful, as are interviews old (with Lizzie Borden) and new (with Gary Garrels), and quadratone plates that impart a sense of the physicality and nuanced authority of Serra’s omnipresent blacks.

Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art, Katy Siegel, Reaktion Books
Siegel argues that for artists working in the shadow of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud, social engagement was not a conceptual option but an existential condition. Eschewing any unifying narrative of the postwar period, the author structures her reading of history on binaries—”Black and White,” “Success and Failure,” “The One and the Many”—that embrace permanent irresolution, opening up her analysis rather than sewing it up. Her love of the sweeping, image-laden rhetoric of the American literary canon inflects her writing with subtle but insistent rhythms of ecstasy and desolation.