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.

Since its launch in 2012, Made in L.A. has become one of the country’s most closely watched recurring exhibitions, launching artists to greater mainstream recognition and helping to cement Los Angeles’s place as an art capital. The inaugural edition featured 60 artists, while the most recent one in 2021 (delayed from 2020 by the pandemic) included 30 artists.

The upcoming edition takes its title from a quote by the beloved late artist Noah Purifoy, which is now inscribed on a plaque at Watts Towers, the arts education hub in South Los Angeles: “One does not have to be a visual artist to utilize creative potential. Creativity can be an act of living, a way of life, and a formula for doing the right thing.” In a statement, Nawi described the Watts Towers as “an example for the way in which creative work can be intimately tied to one’s everyday life and to individual practice, hold space for community, and ultimately resonate far beyond itself.”

The 39 artists on the list represent a broad swath of artists working in South California of varying ages, which a press release says highlights “a wide-ranging network of artistic affinities, legacies, and dialogues through intergenerational constellations formed through shared visual and material languages.”

About a quarter of the artists were born in the 1990s, with the youngest artist on the list being LA native Vincent Enrique Hernandez, who was born in 1998. On the opposite end of the spectrum, five artists are in their 70s or 80s, with the oldest artist on the list being Jessie Homer French, who was born in New York in 1940. French was included in the 2022 Venice Biennale’s main exhibition.

The exhibition includes only one deceased artist, ceramicist Luis Bermudez, who died in 2021. Bermudez will likely be one of the exhibition’s biggest reappraisals, as his last solo exhibition opened in 2010 at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in Ojai and his last group show was in 2012, according to his website.

In a statement, Ramírez said, “Made in L.A. 2023 takes its cues from the ethos of Los Angeles, a place where a multiplicity of cultures coexist and where, as an artist said to us, ‘one is always a visitor.’ The artists and collectives we included in this biennial represent a wide range of art being made in the city but also a diversity of stakes of making art.”

The exhibition also includes major figures of the city’s Chicanx community, including Joey Terrill, Victor Estrada, and Guadalupe Rosales. Terrill is best-known for his expansive painting practice that documented the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s and how it impacted L.A.’s Chicanx creative community.

After a powerful showing in the major exhibition “Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.,” curated by David Evans Frantz and C. Ondine Chavoya as part of PST: LA/LA in 2017, he has had a resurgence of interest, with recent solo outings at Park View / Paul Soto in Los Angeles and Ortuzar Projects in New York. With a practice spanning three decades, Estrada first came to prominence in the 1990s with the inclusion of a piece in the landmark 1992 show “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Rosales is best-known for her two archival projects, “Veteranas and Rucas” and “Map Pointz,” which collect found and sourced images on Instagram that aim to preserve the histories of Latinx communities across Southern California from their own points of view. But her own practice has also been taking off recently, with her photographs being included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and a major mural commission that year at the Dallas Museum of Art. Later this year, she will show new work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in a three-person show with rafa esparza and Mario Ayala.

The artist list also includes closely watched L.A.-based artists like Melissa Cody (Navajo/Diné), Young Joon Kwak, Kang Seung Lee, and Dominique Moody, as well as rising ones like Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa), Emmanuel Louisnord Desir, Dan Herschlein, Esteban Ramón Pérez, Ryan Preciado, and Chiffon Thomas. The show will also include three collectives or organizations: AMBOS: Art Made Between Opposite Sides (established 2016), Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (2013), and Mas Exitos (2010). 

In a statement, Hammer director Ann Philbin said the upcoming biennial “emphasizes that art is inseparable from everyday life and community, informed by a wide range of cultural histories. Diana and Pablo have selected 39 artists and collectives whose inspiring work we are thrilled to present in nearly every gallery and space in our newly renovated museum.” 

The full artist list follows below.

•    Marcel Alcalá b. 1990, Santa Ana, California
•    Michael Alvarez b. 1983, Los Angeles, California
•    AMBOS: Art Made Between Opposite Sides est. 2016, Tijuana, Mexico/San Diego, California
•    Jackie Amézquita b. 1985, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala
•    Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa) b. 1985, Watford City, North Dakota
•    Luis Bermudez b. 1953, d. 2021, Los Angeles, California
•    Sula Bermúdez-Silverman b. 1993, New York, New York
•    Jibz Cameron b. 1975, California
•    Melissa Cody (Navajo/Diné) b. 1983, No Water Mesa, Arizona 
•    Emmanuel Louisnord Desir b. 1997, New York, New York
•    Victor Estrada b. 1956, Burbank, California
•    Nancy Evans b. 1949, Los Angeles, California
•    Pippa Garner b. 1943, Evanston, Illinois
•    Ishi Glinsky (Tohono O’odham) b. 1982, Tucson, Arizona
•    Vincent Enrique Hernandez b. 1998, Los Angeles, California
•    Dan Herschlein b. 1989, Bayville, New York
•    Jessie Homer French b. 1940, New York, New York 
•    Akinsanya Kambon b. 1946, Sacramento, California
•    Kyle Kilty b. 1976, South Lake Tahoe, California
•    Young Joon Kwak b. 1984, New York, New York
•    Kang Seung Lee b. 1978, Seoul, South Korea
•    Tidawhitney Lek b. 1992, Long Beach, California
•    Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) est. 2013
•    Maria Maea b. 1988, Long Beach, California
•    Erica Mahinay b. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico
•    Mas Exitos est. 2010
•    Dominique Moody b. 1956, Augsburg, Germany
•    Paige Jiyoung Moon b. 1984, Seoul, South Korea
•    Esteban Ramón Pérez b. 1989, Los Angeles, California
•    Page Person b. 1972, Atlanta, Georgia
•    Roksana Pirouzmand b. 1990, Yazd, Iran
•    Ryan Preciado b. 1989, El Monte, California
•    Devin Reynolds b. 1991, Venice Beach, California
•    Miller Robinson (Karuk/Yurok) b. 1992, Lodi, California
•    Guadalupe Rosales b. 1980, Redwood City, California
•    Christopher Suarez b. 1994, Long Beach, California
•    Joey Terrill b. 1955, Los Angeles, California
•    Chiffon Thomas b. 1991, Chicago, Illinois
•    Teresa Tolliver b. 1945, Los Angeles, California

To me, the change is surprisingly subtle; the refinished lobby features a larger, more centrally located information desk, but otherwise feels like the same airy rectangular architecture of recent memory. During the unveiling, however, Hammer director Ann Philbin disagreed.

“It’s not subtle. It’s huge,” she told ARTnews. “To have that opening onto the street, and to have the transparency of those beautiful windows that look in at the art—to me, it’s a total gamechanger.”

The museum is now in the final phase of a gradual transformation that began more than 20 years ago, when Philbin commissioned a then-emerging Maltzan to rework the entirety of its home from the inside out. These latest renovations look at the space from the outside in, foregrounding opportunities for dramatic, large-scale works to really say to the surrounding Westwood neighborhood, Hey! We’ve got art in here. From the new sculpture terrace, Sanford Biggers’s monumental Oracle, 2021, a wise, seated figure cast in seven tons of bronze, will greet passing traffic on Wilshire and Glendon Avenue through 2024. And through late August, pedestrians can peer into the lobby windows to see Chiharu Shiota’s grand staircase installation, a meticulously woven network of 800 pounds of red yarn that feels simultaneously womb-like, cancerous, and riveting.

It’s been Philbin’s longtime goal to raise the Hammer’s profile, not just within the art world but among the museum’s neighbors. Shortly after her arrival in 1999, an early informal audit showed that most pedestrians had no idea where the Hammer was, despite standing just outside its entrance. “The truth of the matter is that we used to be almost invisible,” she said. “People thought we were part of an office building.”

The Hammer is, in fact, an extension of what was Occidental Petroleum’s 16-story corporate tower, where oil magnate Armand Hammer once presided as chair. In 1990, to house Hammer’s collection of Impressionism and Old Masters, architect Edward Larrabee Barnes designed a nearly windowless block of black and white marble, accessible to this day through the tower’s ground floor. His architecture followed the centuries-old approach of treating museums as “temples,” according to Philbin—that is, rarified spaces for the contemplation of art. “It never said, museum, it never said welcome. It never said come in,” she said, also lamenting Larrabee Barnes’ cramped galleries of “bad ceilings” and “terrible lighting.”

In 1994, four years after Hammer’s death, the University of California, Los Angeles assumed care of his collection. In 2000, Maltzan drafted a master plan that reinvisioned the building as the “city’s living room,” which in short order included the addition of a theater and cafe in 2006, the completion of a sunny outdoor courtyard in 2012, and a 60-percent increase in total exhibition space. The process unfolded incrementally as fundraising would allow, with other external factors. The $10-million, 2017 overhaul of the third-floor exhibition spaces, for example, might never have happened if an unnamed artist, invited to mount a retrospective, hadn’t point blank told Philbin, “I don’t like your galleries.”

Billed as “the completion of two decades of transformation,” the Hammer’s street-level reinvention might be better described as the beginning of the end. There still remains the conversion of a former City National Bank location into a new gallery, an expansion made possible by UCLA’s $92.5-million purchase of the entire building in 2015. During the pandemic, funds to finish and connect the space to the Hammer’s lobby were diverted to the prevention of layoffs, leaving the staff intact, but the former bank in a state of patchy terrazzo flooring with missing ceiling tiles. According to Philbin, artist Rita McBride saw this as the ideal “corporate ruin” for her Particulates installation, a vertical ring of green laser beams evocative of a bank heist, on view through November. While additional fundraising for construction is underway, visitors can view the piece by exiting the museum, then taking a bit of a wander before finding the entrance to the bank.

The transparent lobby has become the prevailing trend of museum makeovers in the last decade, presented as a major feature in the overhauls of Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2016, and many more. As institutions evolved to embrace a culture of inclusivity, the idea emerged that a bright, spacious entryway is less intimidating to the general public—and therefore gets more bodies through the door. Facades, however, don’t always do all that they say they will.

Despite the museum’s announcement of a new “dramatic presence across a full city block,” passing pedestrians and motorists are unlikely to detect much of a difference. Biggers’ sculpture, which debuted in the corporate enclave of Rockefeller Center in 2021, is only visible from the north side of Glendon, while the new bank gallery is hidden from the street behind black reflective windows. The sign above the door still does not say “museum,” but rather “Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center. (The entire building is now named after the owners of brands including Fiji Water and POM Wonderful, whose $30-million 2018 donation really helped jumpstart construction.)

All of this is to say that the museum still very much looks like part of an office building—there’s no hiding the 15 floors of glass and marble rising above it—but following the goals they set for the museum 20 years ago, Philbin and Maltzan have largely already achieved what they set out to do. The Hammer today is a pillar in LA’s artistic community, having platformed countless careers since the 2010 creation of the Made in L.A. biennial, and since 2005, assembled a robust collection of contemporary works that have long since departed from Armand Hammer’s narrow vision.

(The exhibition tied to the unveiling, “Together in Time,” presents a tightly packed cross-section of the museum’s contemporary holdings, not quite chronologically or thematically, but through the lens of recent market forces; think a grid painting by Charles Gaines from 2019, the year after the 79-year-old artist joined the roster of Hauser & Wirth, or a 2019 portrait by Amoako Boafo, gifted by his local gallerists, Julie and Bennett Roberts.)

The real game changer was not the reorientation of the Hammer’s entrance, but its elimination of admission fees in 2014, which led to a 25 percent jump in attendance. Now, on any given day, the museum is full of people, often gathered in Maltzan’s airy courtyard as if it were indeed a living room. Some come to enjoy the exhibitions, while others are there for the free Wi-Fi or an idyllic place to have lunch—all of which is fine, according to Philbin. For potential museum-goers, it seems the most compelling factor is being able to afford the entrance, rather than what it looks like.

And a posthumous ritual of a different form is currently on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Curated by another iconic writer, Hilton Als’s “Joan Didion: What She Means” looks to build a portrait of Didion and the disparate threads that move through her writings and life phases, recomposing her through meandering parts, while at the same time unraveling them.

This genre of portrait exhibitions is a familiar one for Als, who has organized similar shows dedicated to writers Toni Morrison and James Baldwin and artists Alice Neel and Frank. “I think that the shows are in some way, the visual equivalent of essay writing,” Als told ARTnews in an interview.  

With Didion’s permission, Als began working on this new show in 2019, roughly two years before her passing. In addition to including objects related to Didion and artists who have honored her in the work, Als wanted his show to draw from exhibitions that have stuck with him over the years, like “The Times Square Show,” a 1980 raucous convening of more than 100 New York artists organized by Colab (aka Collaborative Projects Inc.). “They weren’t prescribed to what an exhibition in the museum was supposed to be,” Als recalled of the 1980 show. “I’m always looking to see the effects of that kind of feeling in exhibitions.”

Parsing Didion’s biography through visuals is a massive task, Als said, and he has aimed to compose the Hammer show with an experimental spirit in mind. “I think that one of the things that is very important to me as a writer and as a visual person is to figure out the ways in which text and image can work together,” he said.  

Across more than 200 objects, spanning paintings, sculpture, photography, video, and ephemera, the exhibition, which is on view until February 19 before it travels to the Pérez Art Museum Miami in July, includes work by artists like Ed Ruscha, Irving Penn, and Andy Warhol, whom Didion collected, alongside the work of several major contemporary artists like Betye Saar, Noah Purifoy, Jack Pierson, Suzanne Jackson, Glenn Ligon, and Martin Puryear, among others. Alongside the Hammer’s chief curator Connie Butler, Als organized the exhibition according to Didion’s biography, beginning with a section focused on Didion’s upbringing in Sacramento and move to Berkeley and ending with an examination of the latter part of her life, in which she grappled with grief, over the death of her husband and daughter.

The exhibition’s first section takes as a theme water and fluidity, abounding with references to the American West. In Pat Steir’s large-scale, black-and-white abstraction July Waterfall (1991), water is portrayed in abundant form, cascading downwards, while  in Maren Hassinger’s 1972 sculpture River, water acts as a proxy for the nostalgic imagery that Didion used to describe her Sacramento roots. A black metallic chain installed on the floor in a snake-like form, River recalls the “light and energy” of Sacramento’s riversides, Als said. Nearby is an except from the 1939 John Wayne Western Stagecoach, a touchstone in Didion’s writing, in particular the myth-making of cinema that fascinated her.

Next comes Didion’s time in New York, which proved to be consequential to her writing career. The focal point of this section is Hughie Lee-Smith’s Pumping Station (1960), in which a woman stands on the roof of a brick structure, with her back to the viewer. Als connected it to Didion’s early-career stint as a copy editor for Vogue, which she described in her writing as dull and arduous work. “I think that painting says a lot about young womanhood, about being co-opted,” Als said. “It’s a real transition between her being one of the observers to becoming observed herself.”

Works like these are meant to evoke how Didion described her surroundings, as she did in a 1979 New York Times review of Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song” (also on view in a nearby vitrine), in which she describes the region’s “vast emptiness” as a place where “every road runs into the desert.”

Further along is Warhol’s unfinished Reel 77 of **** (Four Stars), a 1967 video shot on 16-mm film that was commissioned by the Catholic Church, captures the sun, saturated in purple light, as it slowly sets over Malibu, where Didion once live. “It could be her vantage point or yours,” he said; that the work is unfinished project “adds a certain kind of poetry and pathos to it.”

Didion penned “The White Album,” which chronicles the unnerving feelings felt from violent events of the 1960s, while living in Malibu. A Noah Purifoy sculpture that includes rubble from the 1965 Watts Riots, Als said, relates to the era’s political frictions and Didion’s role as a reporter covering them: “recording seismic changes in culture … becoming a character who is as much in flux as the times are.”

Among the final works in the show is Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (from the Sileuta Series), from 1976, showing ocean waves washing away an imprint of the artist’ body in the sand. A nod to the intense grief Didion experienced and wrote about after the deaths of her husband and daughter two years apart, in 2003 and 2005. Als sees Mendieta’s presence in the work as “a disappeared figure” in which “life and death interact in a single frame.”

Taken together, Als said the show’s vast visual and cultural imagery is meant to elucidate Didion’s “rivers of thought” on the changes in culture she tracked for some six decades. He noted, “If you are going to tell the truth about something, you find the visual corollary for that truth.”

The Headlines

A DISPATCH FROM DOWN UNDER. On December 3, the Art Gallery of New South Wales will open to the public a vast new wing, dubbed Sydney Modern, which doubles its exhibition space. One notable feature of the opening at the SANAA–designed venue, which was built for some AU$344 million (US$231 million), is that just over half of the art it is displaying (53 percent) was made by women, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The museum will host nine days of free programs, including performances and panel discussions, ArtAsiaPacific reports. And Designboom has a photo-rich feature on the building, which is the first public Australian art museum to be given a six-star Green Star design rating for its environmental sustainability.

A HOMECOMING. In a profile that doubles as a survey of the current Berlin art landscape, WSJ Magazine chatted with Klaus Biesenbach, who started as director of the Neue Nationalgalerie earlier this year. Some intriguing tidbits: Biesenbach was offered the job 14 years ago but turned it down (“my biggest professional mistake”), and he’s “working very diligently” with architect Jacques Herzog on making tweaks to the design of the controversial, under-construction Museum of the 20th Century, which is under his purview. A few years ago, the former MoMA PS1 leader wrote about cutting his teeth in art world of the German capital in the 1990s in ARTnews. Now that he is back there, he told WSJ, “For me it’s like two movies: I see this world now and I also see how it was 33 years ago, and it’s an incredible change.”

The Digest

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles said that it will unveil the final component of its ongoing expansion and renovation on March 26, which includes a new lobby. The project adds 40,000 square feet of space to the museum; about a quarter of that is for exhibitions. The museum also announced that it has raised $156 million for a $180-million capital campaign. [Los Angeles Times]

Staffers at the Royal Society of the Arts in London voted to unionize, with 86 percent in favor of joining the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB). The RSA’s leadership had opposed the move, though the organization gave an award to the IWGB a few years back for its efforts to unionize gig-economy workers. [The Guardian]

Artist Graeme Drendel won Australia’s AU$150,000 ($100,500) Doug Moran National Portrait Prize—the art award with the biggest purse in the country—for a portrait he made of fellow artist Lewis Miller, who had entered with a painting of Drendel. “I expected his painting of me to win, it is a ripper,” Drendel said. [The Guardian]

Art critic Ben Davis visited the immersive digital experience “Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion” at New York’s Hall des Lumières with Klimt expert Jane Kallir, who offered a mixed review of the proceedings. [Artnet News]

The 2023 edition of Architectural Digest’s AD100—a grouping of top design talents—includes art-world favorites SO-IL (who did the Amant art space in Brooklyn), WHY (the Cheech Marin Center), and Green River Project (whose founders previously worked for artists Nate Lowman and Robert Gober. [AD]

There’s never a dull moment down in Miami Beach. Singer Pink reportedly snapped up a $5,000 painting from a show of art by chimpanzees that was curated by (human) artist Karen Bystedt at the New World Symphony Center. Proceeds from the exhibition are benefiting the Save the Chimps sanctuary in Fort Pierce, Florida. [Page Six]

The Kicker

BAD PAINTING. In the new film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, actor Edward Norton plays an ultra-wealthy, ultra-ostentatious entrepreneur with a formidable art collection. The Wall Street Journal took a look at how the movie’s creators went about selecting his art holdings. Some spoilers: There’s a Mark Rothko (hung upside-down), a juicy late Cy Twombly, and—why not?— a boat dock said to be designed by Banksy . “For all of us, it had to be just the wrong side of gauche and bad taste,” set decorator Elli Griff told the paper. [WSJ]

Almost an hour long, the video features actors reading aloud from a selection of inquiring letters that vary widely in affect, etiquette, and contextual detail. Whereas some performances are deadpan, as is the enactment of a clear-sighted married mother of four from Walla Walla, Washington, others brim with emotion, like that of a teary woman, a chihuahua sitting on her lap as she vocalizes a mother writing from Hood River, Oregon, on behalf of her pregnant 21-year-old daughter. Each reader sits before a different resplendent bouquet that injects an uneasy funereal quality; after all, the video does not reveal the outcomes for any of the women whose stories are so briefly told here. The actors appear in clothing from the mid-2000s rather than period dress, as if to bring the compendium into the present to illuminate the ongoing obstacles individuals face when seeking abortions.

While the video makes this epistolary archive audible, the bound collection and wall installation—a checkered pattern of enlarged photocopied reproductions and decorative wrapping paper—make it visible. The emphatic physical presentation of these formerly furtive letters elicits a tension between public and private, while the project as a whole considers silence and speech, stillness and action. As if anticipating an era of nauseating regression, Bowers’s eternally urgent work insists that, when words fail us most, we need them more than ever.

With a focus ranging from feats of performance and research to philosophical writings and the legacy of “total works of art,” the show “will be a living, breathing entity that changes over the span of the exhibition,” according to the Hammer, and “the individual contributions to ‘Lifes’ are not necessarily conceived as discrete units but rather parts of a larger whole.”

To learn more about the origin and evolution of the exhibition—which opens February 16 and runs through May 8—ARTnews conducted an interview with Hammer curator Aram Moshayedi over email.

ARTnews: How did the idea for “Lifes” come into the world, in its earliest form?

Aram Moshayedi: The first working title for the exhibition was “Salade Russe” because I liked the irreverent nod to the Ballets Russes. But as my conversations progressed I realized that the reference was somehow oversaturated. I didn’t want the exhibition to be consumed by the ghost of Sergei Diaghilev, who is already a touchstone for many curators today. As I tried to get away from the impresario figure, I found myself instead gravitating toward Vaslav Nijinsky, the dancer and choreographer whose credits for the Ballets Russes include The Afternoon of the Faun (1912) and The Rite of Spring (1913). I began reading Nijinsky’s diaries with a dear friend and confidant, and I found myself thinking more about how perilous it is to commit one’s self to the conditions of live performance. The body is fragile, it has its limits, and yet there is the expectation that the body of any performer is there for the taking. Audiences are eager to consume, particularly after a period when they’ve been deprived of liveness. And being a curator at a contemporary art museum, I’ve been conflicted by my desire to see live performance in a context otherwise reserved for static objects. Museums are tasked with the preservation and conservation of objects for posterity, but how do they maintain the lives of performers? And, more importantly, why do museums want this to become part of their purview?

I say this all not to give the impression that “Lifes” is an exhibition solely concerned with the conditions of live performance in the museum. It was equally motivated by literary and musical interests, as well as a reappraisal of assemblage as a curatorial strategy. I also just wanted to think about a different approach to curating—one that could sustain my interests and harness the power of disciplines and practices that swim alongside contemporary art. The exhibition started off as an exploration of the so-called total work of art, but only because I think this offered a way to express disciplinary promiscuity.

Illustration: Oliva Mole, 2021.

ARTnews: How did the idea develop or evolve once work on it commenced? Did it change in any way, or take on new directions?

Moshayedi: The process for “Lifes” began by approaching writers, with the idea that their written texts would serve as the basis of subsequent conversations with other invited contributors. I wanted the commissioned texts by Fahim Amir, Asher Hartman, Rindon Johnson, and Adania Shibli to guide the exhibition, and I initially established a structure where any invitations to contribute would be done in consultation with the writer, responding to how they might have imagined their words finding their way into the folds of the exhibition. I didn’t want to force collaboration, but instead to allow conversations to take place naturally without the institutional pressures that so often try to co-opt interdisciplinarity for marketing purposes. At a certain point, in consultation with curatorial assistant Nicholas Barlow and [choreographer] Adam Linder, who took on the role of a dramaturg, I began to make invitations to artists and other contributors who would somehow address the infrastructure of the exhibition. There are works in “Lifes” that emerged in direct relation to the written texts, but others that address the overall structure of the exhibition and that interface with the various practices of mediation that are specific to contemporary art museums and their negotiation of the experience economy.

ARTnews: An exhibition description aligns it with “the legacy of the so-called total work of art.” What are a few such historical works you had in mind?

Moshayedi: I hope that “Lifes” makes no pretense of aligning itself with the legacy of the total artwork. I think recouping the phrase had more to do with undermining its aura than with forming an allegiance. Conversations about Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk seemed unfulfilling, but in the planning of “Lifes” we welcomed a context where Wagner and Diaghilev could converse with George Clinton, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Butch Morris, Daisy Hildyard, Alexander Kluge, and others. The sharing of sources among and between contributors became far more potent than the pursuit of synthesizing poetic, visual, musical, and dramatic art-forms. The late Greg Tate authored an essay for the catalogue on the idea of Black music production as a historical form of curation. To my mind, this contribution unsettles the comfortable status that any claims for the total work of art may have had in the past.

Cover of the catalogue for “Lifes,” edited by Aram Moshayedi with essays by Fahim Amir, Asher Hartman, Shannon Jackson, Rindon Johnson, Adania Shibli, and Greg Tate.

ARTnews: Materials also mention “more than 50 individuals from various creative fields.” Which other creative fields did you delve into, beyond what might most typically be put on view at the Hammer Museum?

Moshayedi: It’s important that the exhibition take part in the forms of knowledge-production that other fields can offer. I also think there is a productive incongruity that occurs when names like Aubrey Plaza are spoken in the same breath as Pauline Oliveros and Senyawa. Where else but an exhibition can one find sensibilities of the entertainment industry and experimental music sharing the same space? If I were to list out creative fields, I think I would undermine the project as a whole. Sure, names like Ralph Lemon carry the baggage of dance, and Rosemarie Trockel the baggage of art, but we also aspire to a way of thinking about “Lifes” that doesn’t instrumentalize the contributors on the basis of their past works. There were also many people we consulted whose names are not afforded a similar billing but whose contributions are indispensable. I am skeptical of my own use of the number 50 to describe the contents of the exhibition. On the one hand it’s a misrepresentation, on the other it’s a deception. Numbers are often used under false pretense to signify how ambitious something might be. “Lifes” makes no claims about its scale. It’s actually rather humble, modest. But it was important to represent the role that individual performers have within the exhibition, so that is why the number stands out. I would like to think the contributors’ list will continue to grow after the exhibition opens—each time a name is added, the makeup of “Lifes” bends in interesting ways and the museum has to respond accordingly.

ARTnews: It also mentions “the possibilities and pitfalls of interdisciplinary artmaking.” What are examples in your mind of such “possibilities and pitfalls”?

Moshayedi: The possibilities are few and the pitfalls are many. Interdisciplinarity is something of a dirty word that should be used with caution. Institutions and fashion brands equally tout an embrace of interdisciplinary collaboration, but the result is most often a bit cringe. Admittedly, though, I find myself struggling to find an adequate vocabulary to describe the alternative. Which is why “Lifes” became the title. It’s not a word, it’s an error—it’s either missing an apostrophe or it’s spelling mistake. But it also implies pluralities of self, it implies the many ways we inhabit the world—not just professionally as artists, dancers, musicians, composers, curators, or whatever we call ourselves. “Lifes” implies grammatical impossibility. There is a quote by Charles Gaines from 1981 that appears as the publication’s epigraph: “The art work, the total art work, involves many aspects of myself, not just one, and they all want to participate in the work. But when the work is done they all disappear, claiming ignorance of the whole affair, and documenting alibis.” Your question reminded me of this passage because any suspicion I have toward so-called interdisciplinary art-making stems from the apparent self-possession that so many of its proponents claim to possess.

ARTnews: What are three or so emblematic works that represent the range of the kind of creations included?

Moshayedi: The only emblematic works I can single out are those that were commissioned for the publication with the intent that they would fuel the contents of the exhibition. I am grateful for the words that Fahim Amir, Asher Hartman, Rindon Johnson, and Adania Shibli leant because “Lifes” would not have been able to mold itself into the shape it has without them as our guides. They are four writers whose individual output has helped shape my thinking as a curator, and I hope the exhibition plays some small part in acknowledging this.

Two other awards, both valued at $25,000, are also given out as part of the prize—one for career achievement, the other for an artist chosen by the public. Those have gone this year to Monica Majoli and Fulton Leroy Washington (a.k.a. Mr. Wash), respectively.

This year’s Made in L.A., which runs through August 1, is split between the Hammer and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. The Mohn Award has been funded by L.A. philanthropists and collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn since the first edition of Made in L.A. in 2012. In conjunction with this year’s award, the Mohns have given the Hammer $5.15 million to support two endowments: one for future editions of the biennial and the award, and another for the acquisition of work by emerging or under-recognized artists.

At this year’s edition of Made in L.A., titled “a version” and curated by Myriam Ben Salah and Lauren Mackler with Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, Williams is showing a grouping of collages juxtaposing images of classical sculptures with pictures of Black women. Other works by Williams have considered structural racism through the histories of plants and the international slave trade.

Williams also runs Cassandra Press, a publishing platform for Black feminist scholarship on an array of topics, including Black Twitter, double consciousness, and misogynoir. Williams produced new readers for the platform during a residency at Luma Westbau in Zurich earlier this year.

It is a big year for Williams, whose first institutional solo show is currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. She also has an exhibition currently on view at Los Angeles’s Night Gallery focused on the myth of Eurydice, spectatorship, and the Black figure. She will have exhibitions in 2021 at the Serpentine Galleries in London and 52 Walker, a new David Zwirner–owned space in New York run by dealer Ebony L. Haynes.

“This award is in recognition not only of Williams’s studio practice, but also of her role as a writer, editor, cultural commentator, and public intellectual,” the Mohn Award jury wrote in a statement. “In the past few years, she has really distinguished herself as someone whose thinking can help us contend with the current moment, the histories that brought us here, and, importantly, point a way forward.”

That jury included Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles senior curator Jamillah James and independent curators Mia Locks and Diana Nawi.

Majoli is known for her works focused on BDSM and gay liberation. At Made in L.A., she is exhibiting archival materials related to Blueboys, one of the first gay magazines in the U.S. The jury said in its statement that Majoli’s art “keeps history alive.”

Mr. Wash has been considered one of the breakouts of this year’s Made in L.A. The artist was incarcerated for more than 20 years on nonviolent drug offenses that he said he did not commit, and in that time, he began painting and drawing. His most recent works feature famous figures—Hillary Clinton, Michael Jackson—shedding oversized tears containing images of the individuals and events on their mind.

Working quietly for decades from a body-shop-turned-studio in Compton, Shiokava created an immense oeuvre that spanned curiosity boxes, junk assemblage, and wood and macramé abstract figures inspired by his Japanese-Brazilian heritage.

Since the mid-1960s, Shiokava mixed and remixed disparate cultural influences that were in stark opposition to much of the art-making in fashion in California at the time, from Light and Space to heady conceptual work. Because of this, institutions had a hard time fitting Shiokava’s wide-ranging work into any one artistic category. Though he had prominent supporters of his art, including actors Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, Shiokava wasn’t able to support himself through the sale of his art alone; he was the longtime groundskeeper for Brando’s L.A. home.

In 2016, at 78, Shiokava received mainstream recognition for his art, when he was include in that year’s edition of the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” biennial. The show’s curators, Hamza Walker and Aram Moshayedi, included 66 of his sculptures composed from felled trees and telephone poles. Gathered, they resembled an alien forest or relics of an ancient mystical rite. For his participation in the show, Shiokava won the biennial’s $25,000 Public Recognition Award, which was decided by a public vote.

“I didn’t know it’d be like this,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2016. “The response has been amazing.”

Shiokava was born and raised in Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo in Brazil, the son of Japanese immigrants who had fled their home country because of economic hardship. In 1964, when he was 25, Shiokava hitched a ride aboard a military transport vehicle to Los Angeles, where his sister had relocated years prior. He considered pursuing a practical degree like medicine but flunked the entrance exam. He viewed the failure with relief: “I felt freer,” he recalled to the L.A. Times.

Instead, he decided to attend art school, and was accepted at the prestigious Chouinard Art Institute on the strength of his sketchbook and slim portfolio of paintings. But he was unhappy studying painting; drawing and silk screening were an equally bad fit. In his fourth year, he was required to take a sculpture class.

“I started cleaning some of the wood and I realize: ‘That’s it! It’s wood!’” he said. “It has a history. It’s right there. I was so excited—nothing else mattered.” He soon created his first series of totemic figures, which were exhibited alongside several assemblages at Chouinard’s gallery.

Joan Ankrum, of Ankrum Gallery, noticed the display and gave Shiokava a solo show in the fall of 1979. His work was generally well-received—a review in the New York Times highlighted his “subtle and provocative undulations”—but it was difficult to sell. He continued with his studies and obtained a master’s in fine arts at Otis Art Institute in 1974.

Shiokava was an artist in residence at the Watts Towers Art Center for several years, and his work was exhibited at the space in a group exhibition in 2012. He was included in the Japanese American National Museum’s exhibition “Transpacific Borderlands: The Art of Japanese Diaspora in Lima, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and São Paulo,” which opened in 2017 as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.

Until his death, Shiokava steadily produced increasingly detailed work—towering carved columns and dioramas of knickknacks scavenged from thrift stores and garage sales.

“What’s always kept me going is people coming to my studio and enjoying the work,” he said. “But now I know my work will have a legacy. My work will live.”

Coronavirus-Related Layoffs

The Cleveland Museum of Art will “furlough all part-time staff and temporarily lay off a portion of its unionized staff, which includes security guards” as it anticipates $5 million in lost revenue. [Cleveland.com]

Endeavor, the Hollywood talent agency which also owns a majority stake in the Frieze art fair and magazine, laid off roughly 250 employees across its portfolio. [Variety]

The Hammer Museum, which is affiliated with UCLA, has laid off 150 part-time student employees. [Los Angeles Times]

The Art World During Coronavirus

Smartify, an app that has catalogued some 2 million artworks from around the world, will make all of its audio guides free through the end of the year. The Guardian]

Art Dubai’s annual Global Art Forum shifted to an online version after the in-person fair was canceled. Billed as a “news hour special” it looked “what are the new stories suddenly emerging.” [ARTnews]

Jason Farago surveys the global art world as it has ground to a halt: “The Merry-Go-Round Stopped. What Sort of Art Will Emerge?” [The New York Times]

James Tarmy looks at how New York’s institutions are beginning to cope with the cancelation of their big spring fundraisers. [Bloomberg]

In their own words, the directors of three Boston museums talk about their decision to close amid the coronavirus outbreak. [The Boston Globe]

Artists

Louise Lawler has created 12 drawings based on her photographs that can be downloaded for free to be used as coloring sheets. MoMA curator Roxana  Marcoci writes, “This gesture comes from the artist’s interest in the way art can reach viewers beyond the museum and gallery system, and can playfully contribute to personal creative transformation.” [MoMA Magazine]

See images by the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of photographs that came together in the 1960s to document Black life in America. The group’s work is the subject of a show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which is currently closed. [The Guardian]

Ajay Kurian previews “Polyphemus,” his solo exhibition scheduled to open in the fall at Baltimore’s Goucher College. The show draws on various texts dealing with the cyclops and how it relates nationalism, fascism, and anti-Semitism. [Artforum]