NEW YORK, NY.- Sarah Arison, Chair of the Board of MoMA PS1, and Glenn D. Lowry, The David Rockefeller Director of The Museum of Modern Art, recently announced that leading contemporary art curator Connie Butler has been named Director of MoMA PS1. Ms. Butler joins MoMA PS1 from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where she has served as Chief Curator since 2013. The appointment marks Ms. Butler’s return to New York, where she was The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art from 2006 to 2013. She also has extensive experience with MoMA PS1, where she served as part of the curatorial team for Greater New York in 2010 and co-organized landmark exhibitions including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2008), Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 (2012), and Mike Kelley (2013). Ms. Butler will assume her new role at MoMA PS1 on September 26, 2023.

Founded in 1976 as the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, MoMA PS1 has been a site for artistic experimentation and creativity for nearly 50 years. Its merger in 2000 with The Museum of Modern Art created the largest platform for contemporary art in the country and one of the largest in the world.

“We are thrilled that Connie Butler will join MoMA PS1 after her outstanding curatorial leadership at the Hammer for the last decade,” 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.”

Glenn D. Lowry said, “Connie Butler is widely known and admired as a trailblazing curator and scholar, as well as a dedicated mentor to rising museum professionals. 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.”

Connie Butler said, “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. 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.”

After beginning her museum career at institutions that included the Des Moines Arts Center, the Neuberger Museum of Art, and Artists Space in New York, Connie Butler joined The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles in 1996 as a curatorial fellow to oversee the Marcia Simon Weisman Collection of works on paper and its Study Center, eventually becoming curator. During her tenure at MOCA she organized and co-organized exhibitions including Afterimage: Drawing Through Process (1999), Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure (2002), Rodney Graham (2004), co-organized with the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Vancouver Art Gallery), and the landmark international survey exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), which she later oversaw at MoMA PS1 (2008).

From 2006 to 2013, as The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at MoMA, she curated exhibitions including the first major Lygia Clark exhibition in the US, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 (2014) and Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave (2008–09)—the artist’s first U.S. retrospective—and co-curated On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2010). She also served as a member of the curatorial team for Greater New York (2010) at MoMA PS1, the third iteration of the quinquennial exhibition organized by MoMA PS1 and The Museum of Modern Art showcasing artists from the New York area.

Returning to Los Angeles to serve as Chief Curator at the Hammer, she organized 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 that opened the museum’s expanded and renovated building. At the Hammer she also led the acquisitions of contemporary artists, ranging from work by Japanese photographer Daidō Moriyama to drawings by Tishan Hsu and recent works by Aria Dean, Nicole Eisenman, Christina Fernandez, Chase Hall, Rita McBride, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and many others. Her curation of the Hammer’s Made in L.A. paralleled her earlier work at MoMA PS1 on Greater New York, with both initiatives reflecting her commitment to highlighting emerging artists from the local community.

A prolific author whose notable works include the essay collection From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74 (2012), Connie Butler received the 2020 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and was a 2020 Fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership. She also serves on the board of the Mike Kelley Foundation in Los Angeles.