The appointment of the new director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles was expected since the announcement of Ann Philbin’s departure: Zoë Ryan will take over as director of the museum next January. Ann Philbin will step down in November after 25 years at the head of the Californian institution.
Zoë Ryan was director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA) after 14 years as curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was responsible for a major collection of architecture and of design.
Zoë Ryan continues the legacy of the former director, particularly with regard to commitment to emerging artists. “The Hammer Museum’s mission is artist-centered. Its program is at the intersection of art and social justice and it has a strong connection to the university. It’s an environment that I find really rewarding”declared Zoë Ryan for the LA Times. She also indicated that she wanted to explore the architectural history of the city of Los Angeles and bring her own architectural expertise.
Ann Philbin joined the Hammer Museum in 1999 when it was a regional university museum with an annual operating budget of $6 million. Aged 72, Ann Philbin contributed to the development of the museum, which in around twenty years has become a contemporary art museum of international stature. In 2000, the former director launched a major expansion project for the museum, costing $180 million, which allowed the institution to increase its exhibition spaces by 12,000 m².
Since the end of the work in 2023, attendance at the museum has quadrupled and the Hammer Museum now has an annual budget estimated at $29 million. Ann Philbin has also modernized the museum’s collections thanks to a major policy of acquiring contemporary works of art since 2005. Among her many initiatives, she opened the museum to emerging artists, notably with the “Made in LA” biennial. , a program that highlights Californian artists in a wide variety of media (painting, sculpture, performance, installation).
Owned by the University of California (UCLA) in Westwood (Los Angeles), the institution opened its doors in 1990 on the initiative of businessman and collector Armand Hammer. Designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, designer of the Dallas Museum of Art, the building was reconfigured by architect Michael Maltzan in 2006. The entrance was enlarged, the ceiling of the main galleries was raised, an auditorium and a performance hall have been added.
The museum has two Armand Hammer collections: a first of more than 4,500 contemporary works and a second collection of European and American painting from the 16th to the 20th century. Among the 103 works, we find paintings by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Gustave Moreau and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The Grundwald Center collection is an impressive collection of 45,000 works of graphic arts (drawings, prints, photographs and artists’ books) ranging from the 15th to the 20th century. The Hammer Museum also has a rich collection of caricatures by Honoré Daumier.
If the museum has great attraction and international stature, it nevertheless faces major contemporary art institutions, such as Moca (Museum of Contemporary Art) and The Broad.
