Connie Butler appointed as Chief Curator and Aram Moshayedi as Curator

LOS ANGELES—The Hammer Museum is pleased to announce the appointment of two new curators.

Cornelia Butler has been appointed Chief Curator at the Hammer. As previously announced in April, Butler will co-curate the Hammer’s biennial exhibition, Made in L.A. 2014, with Michael Ned Holte.

Since 2006 Butler has been The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Butler replaces Douglas Fogle, who departed the Hammer in 2011.

“Connie is returning to L.A. after an impressive tenure at MoMA and the Hammer is thrilled to be welcoming her back to this community—one she knows very well,” says Ann Philbin, Director of the Hammer Museum. “Her depth of experience and range of knowledge—both in historical as well as contemporary art—make her an ideal choice for the Hammer.”

In her new role at the Hammer, Butler will oversee the Hammer’s curatorial department—developing and organizing exhibitions, building the Hammer Contemporary Collection, and overseeing the Hammer’s artist residency program and artist council. Her appointment is effective July 2013.

"I have long admired Annie Philbin, her curators, and the programming at the Hammer. Los Angeles is a great city for the production of art and the Hammer is a museum with artists at its center," says Butler. “It is a thrilling opportunity for any curator and I look forward to bringing my vision, both as a recent outsider but also as someone with a long history in Los Angeles, to the museum."

Butler is co-curating the first major Lygia Clark retrospective in the United States, which will open at MoMA in May, 2014. She recently co-organized the exhibitions Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone 1955-1972, with the Hammer’s Allegra Pesenti, and On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century at MoMA, and co-curated the survey Greater New York at MoMA PS1. She is the co-editor of Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, a groundbreaking examination of works by modern and contemporary women artists in the Museum's collection. She organized WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where she was curator from 1996 to 2006.

In addition Aram Moshayedi has been appointed as Curator in a newly created position also effective July 2013. Since 2010 he has served as the associate curator of the Gallery at The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), where he organized exhibitions and oversaw the production of new works by artists The Otolith Group, Slavs and Tatars, Jordan Wolfson, Tony Cokes, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Ming Wong, and Geoffrey Farmer. Prior to that he was a curator at LA>Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly and Bidoun, for which he is also a contributing editor.