Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Museum names a new director

 


Hammer Museum names a new director, ending speculation over one of L.A.’s prized art posts

Zoë Ryan has been named the Hammer Museum's new director.
 
(Constance Mensh)
  • Zoë Ryan will assume leadership from director Ann Philbin, who headed the Hammer for 25 years.
  • Ryan arrives from Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and is former curator of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago.

One of the highest profile jobs in L.A.’s art world has officially been filled: The UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood announced Monday that its next director will be Zoë Ryan, who arrives from the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ryan will replace Hammer director Ann Philbin, who after transforming the museum over 25 years, is scheduled to depart in November. Ryan, who will start in January, said in an interview that she has long admired how the Hammer has elevated experimental interdisciplinary artists. She also said she intends to build on Philbin’s signature accomplishments, including the Made in L.A. biennial and Hammer Projects, with its deep commitment to emerging voices.

“In many ways the Hammer shares my values and interests,” Ryan said. “Its mission is artist-centered. Its program is at the intersection of art and social justice, and it has a strong connection to the university. This is an environment that I find really rewarding.”

Philbin wrote in an email that she first got to know Ryan when the Hammer and ICA co-presented a 2022 retrospective of Ulysses Jenkins, an important L.A.-based video artist who had not been given his due.

“Zoë has demonstrated a real commitment to artists and specifically to those who have been on the margins,” Philbin said. “She shares the Hammer’s commitment to celebrating risk-taking, experimentation, and diverse voices. She also deeply understands the unique opportunities that come with leading a museum that serves the public while also benefiting from being part of a major university.”

Philbin is known for centering artists, treating them as partners and elevating their profiles. During her tenure, the Hammer staged the first museum shows for the likes of Mark Bradford, Jonas Wood and Njideka Akunyili Crosby and mounted career retrospectives for impactful L.A. artists such as Lari PittmanAndrea Bowers and Al Ruppersberg.

“I love that the Hammer is a place that really cherishes, nurtures and serves the artists and, if I know anything about Zoë, I know that that is a legacy that she will continue,” Philbin said.

Before joining ICA, Ryan spent 14 years as the chair and curator of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was in charge of a collection of more than 250,000 objects, including architectural models, furniture and photography. Architecture and design have not been at the forefront of the Hammer, so Ryan’s expertise presents an opportunity.

“I take a very expansive view of what is an artistic practice, and obviously architecture design is very important to that,” said Ryan, noting L.A.’s rich architectural history, especially when it comes to modern architecture.

She also pointed to the design of the Hammer Museum itself, which recently completed a $90-million expansion and renovation by Michael Maltzan Architecture. Two decades in the making, the finished project debuted to the public in March 2023. Entrances were enhanced and gallery ceilings were raised. An auditorium was revamped, and a performance space, study room and storage area were added.

Maltzan and Philbin worked hard to make the Hammer more open and porous, said Ryan. “Michael is adept at making these campus-like buildings that engage visitors within the galleries, but also in the public spaces. So for me, it’s such an exciting experience to be in the Hammer.”

Also exciting to Ryan is the prospect of partnering with other L.A. arts leaders and institutions, as evidenced by an announcement in August that the Hammer, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art were taking joint ownership and management of a collection of 260 works of art gifted by philanthropists Jarl and Pamela Mohn.

The collection of works by L.A.-based artists, known as MAC3, has a nearly $20-million endowment for future acquisitions, storage and care of the art. The Hammer contributed 80 works collected over the 12 years of its “Made in L.A.” biennials, and16 more pieces were added from “Made in L.A. 2023” by curators from all three museums. The MAC3 collection stands at 356 paintings, sculptures and mixed media works, and every other year new pieces will be added from future “Made in L.A.” biennials.

“That, for me, is the way of the future,” said Ryan. “Where you’re pooling resources, but also sharing in this incredible collection drawn from ‘Made in L.A.,’ with work by some of the brightest artistic minds in the city.”






Friday, September 27, 2024

Wrong About the Border

 

   
What Harris and Trump Get Wrong About the Border

The Vice President rightly condemns Trump's racism, but doesn't push back on the claim that the we are being invaded, writes Andrés Martinez.

Read the full essay. 

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What Harris and Trump Get Wrong About the Border

7 minute read
Ideas
Andrés Martinez is a New America fellow and professor of practice at the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

Mexico, remarkably, is a word that is barely being mentioned in the lead up to the U.S. presidential election. It is not being discussed much on the campaign trail, even though the southern border and immigration are central protagonists in the contest. It takes two sides to have a border, but U.S. political discourse these days treats the 2,000-mile-border with Mexico as if it were the wardrobe leading to Narnia, or the edge of the known world represented by dragons on maps from antiquity. Pet-eating dragons, in Donald Trump’s narrative. Who knows, really, what we’re bordering.

Our southern neighbor and top trading partner was mentioned once in passing in the Sept. 10 presidential debate, and only in the context of auto manufacturing and trade policy. There was no mention of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador; the years of wrangling with his administration over various aspects of immigration policy; Mexico’s current democratic backsliding or the imminent arrival of President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum; the looming joint review of the USMCA trade agreement that must occur by 2026, the high-profile frictions around combating cartel drug lords. Nada specific.

It’s not surprising that talk about the border and immigration no longer borders anything resembling the real world. From the very day Donald Trump announced his first presidential run in June 2015, he has ruthlessly demonized immigrants as mystical, treacherous scapegoats for all our ills. And regardless of how much Trump’s insidious talk of Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating pets gets mocked, or how he fares at the ballot box in November, the sad truth is that he has succeeded in shifting the center of gravity on immigration in our politics.

All sides seem to accept the dangerous Trumpian worldview. Vice President Kamala Harris rightly condemns Trump’s more racist pronouncements and exaggerations, but neither she nor Democratic candidates in tight congressional races appear eager (judging by the commercials I am being bombarded with in my battleground state of Arizona) to push back on his movement’s premise that we are being invaded. Instead, they engage in arguments about who’s to blame for too many people coming, and who’s tough enough to handle the supposed crisis. I don’t see much of an appetite to point out that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans, that we need more legal pathways to attract the workforce we rely on, or that countless economists point out that immigration remains a huge competitive advantage for the U.S. at a time of low unemployment and an aging population.

And I certainly don’t see political leaders refuting Trump’s doomsday proclamations by reminding voters that, whatever today’s frictions in the relationship, in the grand scheme of things the U.S. is very fortunate to border Canada and Mexico.

Indeed, sharing North America with these two friendly neighbors that don’t harbor ill will has provided the U.S. a luxury that no other continental power has enjoyed in modern history. Much like the island-based British Empire in its heyday, the U.S. has been free to project force around the world without having to worry about its own borders. It’s no wonder generations of national security and foreign policy elites in Washington are often more conversant in Russian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern affairs and geography than anything having to do with Canada or Mexico.

Harris has rightly accused Trump of preferring to exploit the idea of a border crisis to addressing it. But Trump hardly started this country’s venerable tradition of treating our most important trading partner with complacent, benign neglect. Because Mexico hasn’t posed a pressing threat to the U.S. for over a century, it could languish off the priority list of policymaking and most Americans. 

My home of Phoenix is one of the most vibrant metropolises of what I like to call MexUs, the glorious swath of the U.S. that was once part of Mexico, which spans from northern California to the Texas Gulf shores. If MexUs were its own country, it would be home to more than 85 million people and the third largest economy in the world.

I often point this out in speaking about the relationship (even to groups of military officials), not to make a huge deal of the fact that so much land changed hands as the result of a war that both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant decried as immoral, but to suggest we should be more appreciative of the fact that it isn’t a huge deal in the relationship. Elsewhere in the world, you can find flashpoints of ongoing tension and hostility between neighbors in many places where far less impressive slivers of land than California or Texas changed hands. 

The U.S. has a long track record of dealing decisively and effectively with existential threats. If the border did pose the national security crisis Trump and his MAGA allies suggest it does, we wouldn’t be relying on a federal law enforcement agency with fewer deployed officers than the NYPD to address it. Nor would we continue to muddle through with our lackadaisical and incoherent set of immigration policies that can be summed up as conflicting signs posted along the border, one reading “Do Not Trespass;” the other “Help Wanted: Inquire Within.”

Yet this approach isn’t a cost-free indulgence. With all the nonsensical talk of invading migrants and the border crisis, legitimate challenges and frictions aren’t being addressed. It is an affront to the rule of law to rely on a workforce of millions of undocumented migrant workers forced to live in the shadows because we haven’t provided adequate legal pathways for immigration. And you don’t have to be an anti-immigrant zealot to agree that in the absence of such realistic legal channels for immigration, the asylum-seeking process has been abused and that border infrastructure and public services in some communities when the number of arrivals spike are overwhelmed. But these are solvable problems if we were in a problem-solving mood.

As for our relationship with Mexico, in a more rational policymaking universe we would engage with its government to develop a regional, North American migration policy that reflected our interdependence. After all, in 2023 more than half the migrants seeking to cross our southern border came from countries beyond Mexico, and the occasional overwhelming spikes in arrivals tend to be driven by events in Venezuela or Central America. North America would do well to have a coordinated approach to immigration for the entire region, in the same way the European Union does. We would also try to align our energy policies and work toward shoring up the rule of law and democracy. The U.S.-Mexico relationship should be a considerable asset for both countries, but politics undermines its potential.

This is also true of America’s own relationship with its immigrant population, not to mention our heritage as a nation of immigrants. Immigration is a blessing the U.S. needs to nurture and manage, but our shared politicized narratives on the subject are veering so dangerously off course that a serious contender for the presidency can pass off talk of deporting millions of hardworking immigrants as a sensible proposal. If we continue down this road, we may end up with a truly existential crisis, not just one made up to fire up a political campaign.

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