Finding Her Path Along the Way : Anne Ayres has all the background she needs to be a curator, but don’t think she planned it that way.

With a doctorate in art history, 20 years of experience as a teacher, curator and administrator and a list of two dozen exhibitions she has organized--including “Karen Carson: But Enough About Me,” currently at Otis College of Art and Design, where she directs the gallery--Anne Ayres might appear to have followed a straight and narrow path to a challenging career.

But her resume doesn’t tell the full story. Furthermore, Ayres isn’t nuts about the C-word. “I’m not sure I even have a career,” she protested over the telephone, in response to a request for an interview. “I’ve never had a five-year plan, and I don’t intend to have one,” she said a few days later in the gallery, surrounded by Carson’s paintings.

Ayres isn’t being coy. She’s just acutely aware of having started rather late in life, after raising two children, and that when she finally turned a pleasant sideline into a profession, she veered off in an unplanned direction.

Growing up in New York, Ayres spent a lot of time at the Museum of Modern Art. “My parents were real modernists and socialists politically,” she said. “I’m sure I exaggerate, but to some extent they felt that anything before Manet was not worth looking at.”

Although art was not their primary calling, it was part of their lives. Their daughter got the message that “art and art history was just something you did normally, like reading good books.” When she went off to Smith College, in 1954-57, she majored in sociology.

Soon after graduation, she married Gerry Ayres, who is an independent film writer and producer. The couple and their children moved to Los Angeles in 1963 so that Gerry could work as an assistant head of Columbia Pictures. They were divorced in the mid-1970s, and Anne decided to enroll in a graduate art history program at USC.

“I think I went back to school to study art history in a kind of lady-like way,” she said. “But I was lucky in studying with [USC professor] Susan Larsen, who was very encouraging in terms of modern and contemporary art and in working with the art object itself.”

Ayres’ plunge into art history led to discoveries. “I was amazed by the Italian Baroque,” she said. “It seemed so odd and exotic, I almost went into that field. But I think we usually settle in that which is most comfortable to us visually, and for me that was early modernism.”

She had planned to teach art history, and did so during the late 1970s and early ‘80s, at USC and Los Angeles Valley College. But an internship at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--working with curator Stephanie Barron on the 1980 exhibition “The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New Perspectives”--made her think that curatorial work might be more rewarding.

“It was an eye-opening show for me,” Ayres said. “I was a lowly intern, but I learned so much from Stephanie. Then I went on to do educational programs for the show. There could hardly have been a better exhibition in terms of ambition. And in terms of its aesthetic, it certainly fit my personal preferences for Cubism and the Russian avant-garde and abstraction.”

She was granted her doctorate in 1983 and soon tackled an independent project for UCLA’s Wight Gallery, “Forty Years of California Assemblage,” which was presented in 1989. In the meantime, she landed an associate curator’s position at the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

“Paul Schimmel hired me in 1985, and I’ve just never looked back,” Ayres said. “Scholarship was a way to hide out, but I discovered that I didn’t want to hide out at all. I really enjoyed working with people.”

Schimmel, who left Newport in 1990 to become chief curator at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, said that Ayres had “all the qualities you want in a curator. She had a passion for objects, strong writing ability and she hung out with artists, which is unusual for an art historian.”

And there’s another thing that he considers essential: “She had no museum experience. She knew not what you can and cannot do at museums, and I think that has served her well.”

Still, Ayres considers herself lucky. “I sometimes feel, given the rise of curatorial studies and museum studies programs, that I wouldn’t have a chance in hell of getting that job today. In some ways I think I have always just made it up as I went along. I had art history and teaching experience, but very little experience as a curator when I went to Newport, and no experience as a director when I came here.”

At Newport, where Schimmel developed national and international projects, Ayres concentrated on the West Coast, organizing biennial surveys, the New California Artist Series and “L.A. Pop in the Sixties,” which examined the movement’s conceptual underpinnings. She also worked with Schimmel on a retrospective of Chris Burden’s work.

Moving on to Otis in 1988, she became director of the gallery but she also serves as its curator. Her credits include exhibitions of works by Los Angeles artists Barbara Benish, Liz Young and Emerson Woelffer and adventurous group shows with provocative titles, such as “Raw Grace” and “Material Consequences.” She also has provided a lively forum for guest curators to present their ideas, including Maria Guerra’s “Las Nuevas Majas” in 1994 and Michael Cohen’s “Narcissistic Disturbance” in 1995.

In the case of Carson, Ayres found a much-needed partner in the Santa Monica Museum of Art, but that presented coordination problems. “I want people to say, ‘Yes, you’ve seen the show at Santa Monica, but you haven’t really seen the breadth of the work until you’ve seen the show at Otis,’ ” she said. As it turned out, the Santa Monica Museum is presenting a 25-year survey, while Otis is showing what Ayres calls “a Karen Carson assemblage” of strong pieces. Additionally, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions has re-created Carson’s 1992 installation, “It’s a Small World,” and the Rosamund Felsen Gallery is offering an assortment of works on paper.

One-person exhibitions are fascinating exercises in connoisseurship, Ayres said, but group shows are “the major challenge.” She deals with it by “thinking visually” instead of illustrating a theme. “When I find a particular artist I’m interested in, I just let it slosh around in the back of my mind in terms of what other kinds of art would support it visually, and provide a contrast but not a clash. I tend to have a great deal of faith that something will emerge that’s coherent. More often than not, it does,” she said.

Seeing a concept evolve as an exhibition is satisfying, but so is installing the art, Ayres said. “I care a great deal about the display of the work and how the pieces talk to each other. I think I do it well, actually, and it has been a great pleasure to discover that.”