Connie Butler, long time of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, will move east to direct MoMA PS1. Butler is no stranger to MoMA: before she joined the Hammer she was MoMA’s chief curator of drawings from 2006 to 2013. At PS1 in Long Island she co-curated the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2008), Greater New York (2010), Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 (2012) and Mike Kelley’s touring 2013 solo show.
Butler takes over from Kate Fowle who left after just three years in the job, most of which was spent steering the institution through the pandemic years. Fowle focused on outreach to the local Queens communities and social justice issues, a focus that Butler has stated that she plans to continue.
In L.A., Butler organised exhibitions including the biennial Made in L.A. (2014), Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth (2015), Marisa Merz: The Sky is a Great Space (2017), Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions (2018, a collaboration with MoMA) Andrea Fraser: Men on the Line (2019), the retrospective Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence (2019), and most recently Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection (2023), a major exhibition which opened the museum’s expanded and renovated building.
