Shopping Spree : Art: Curator wins coveted award allowing her to personally choose $50,000 worth of art for the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.

“I opened the letter and I hyperventilated. I just said ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ ” said Madeleine Grynsztejn, who just received a grant from the Los Angeles-based Peter Norton Family Foundation to purchase $50,000 worth of art for the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, where she serves as associate curator.

The Norton money will allow Grynsztejn (pronounced Grun-steen), 29, to make a permanent contribution to the museum’s collection that reflects her vision of contemporary art.

To date, seven awards have been made since being established in 1989 to recognize independent-minded curators.

This year’s went to Grynsztejn and Trevor Fairbrother, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Grynsztejn, a curator with the museum since 1986, has become known for organizing provocative and controversial shows. She does not yet know how she will spend the money--the notice came just a week ago--but she must spend it within a year.

“It is challenging me to think very seriously and to make a good decision about what I think is strong in the field of contemporary art. And it is asking me to stand up and be accountable,” she said.

“It’s a great opportunity because it puts an emphasis on the best part of my job, which is looking at, thinking about and believing in a work of art,” Grynsztejn said.

She has been involved in recommending purchases to the museum in the past, but Grynsztejn said this grant will be different because it allows more freedom to select the work on the basis of personal taste. And though the museum’s trustees will ultimately have to approve the acquisition of any works purchased with the funds, she said Hugh Davies, the museum’s director, has indicated that he will support her choices.

“Hugh has been very clear and very generous in saying it’s a curator’s grant that, in the spirit of the Norton Foundation, allows me a tremendous amount of freedom.”

The foundation’s process of awarding such grants to curators is both secretive and idiosyncratic. Peter Norton, the foundation founder who is personally very involved in the program, said the curators are selected through “networking.”

“We ask for recommendations from people we know, whose opinions we respect,” including past recipients, Norton said from Los Angeles. “This year, Madeleine’s name came up constantly.”

The goal of the award, Norton said, is to “recognize fresher faces that are climbing the professional curve.” Then, he said, it’s up to them. “The curators select the works. We buy them,” Norton said.

Other recipients have included Paul Schimmel, formerly of the Newport Harbor Art Museum and currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Kathy Halbreich, formerly of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and currently director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Robert Storr of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Norton had never met Grynsztejn before making the grant, and, in fact, made a special trip to La Jolla to attempt to meet her before the grant was announced. But because he didn’t want to divulge his reasons for coming, he never accomplished his mission.

“We knew Hugh (Davies) and had lunch with him and his wife, Lynda Forsha, who is also a curator there, but we didn’t want to tell why we came, so by chance we met just about everybody on the staff but her.”

Since she came to the museum, Grynsztejn has often focused on art with a political orientation. Her shows have included Krzysztof Wodiczko’s one-night show in 1988, during which the artist projected images about illegal immigration on the exterior of the prominent buildings in San Diego and Tijuana; Alfredo Jaar’s show of large projected photographs of impoverished gold-diggers in the Amazon; and the current two-year project “Dos Ciudades/Two Cities,” including exhibitions, commissions, billboard projects and other publications, all of which focus on issues of immigration and international borders. She also organized a show of art from Tijuana and a six-artist show of new art from Los Angeles.

Born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Venezuela and New York, Grynsztejn was educated in art history at Columbia and Tulane universities and the Sorbonne in Paris. But she has focused primarily on contemporary art since earning a master’s degree from Columbia in 1985.

“The reason I moved more and more towards contemporary art, until finally now I’m working with people who aren’t established, is because I got tired in graduate school of throwing everybody else’s ideas into a Cuisinart and coming out with something that wasn’t truly my opinion. Contemporary art is a wide-open field that allows for successes and mistakes. In contemporary art I can contribute. Part of the job is to interpret your moment in time, that’s why my contemporaries are so interesting to me.”

Norton said he has given curators free reign to choose what they like--even though the foundation’s name goes on the museum label once the work is purchased. He said he only sometimes likes what they select.

“We’ve had people select stuff which we think is stinko,” he said. “And we’ve told them so. But it’s not our business to second-guess their choices. Once we give the grant it’s up to them to choose.”