UCLA Hammer lures MoMA curator west

Gary Garrels, a leading curator of contemporary art who has held high-profile positions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the last five years, has been appointed senior curator at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Currently head of the department of drawings and curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, Garrels will assume his new position June 1.

“Gary has an enormous breadth of experience,” Hammer Director Ann Philbin said, referring to Garrels’ distinguished record at museums across the country. “He is highly respected internationally.” Also a longtime supporter of Los Angeles’ art community, he has acquired works by many Los Angeles-based artists for MoMA’s collection.

MoMA Director Glenn Lowry called Garrels “a tremendous asset” to the New York museum and praised his curatorial work. “We are very sorry to see him leave,” Lowry said, “but also very pleased for him, that he has found what sounds like the ideal position for himself.”

Garrels, 53, said the evolution of the Hammer and Los Angeles’ art scene persuaded him to move.

“Having watched the Hammer over the last few years, I feel that it’s a very vibrant, dynamic institution,” he said. “It offers me a chance to open up my thinking, work out experimental ideas -- really to refresh and renew my intellectual and professional life. Things can happen very quickly at the Hammer. It’s a very creative environment that gives me a perfect sounding board for thinking out loud.

“Los Angeles is one of the great centers for contemporary art right now, with New York, Berlin and London,” he said. “It has really matured over the last 10 years, placing it in a much stronger position than ever before.”

Educated in art history at Boston University and in sociology at Princeton University, Garrels was director of programs at the Dia Art Foundation in New York from 1987 to 1991 and senior curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1991 to 1993. As chief curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, from 1993 to 2000, he organized exhibitions of the work of Sol LeWitt and Willem de Kooning and projects with such artists as Richard Hamilton, Doris Salcedo and Andrea Zittel.

At MoMA, Garrels curated “Roth Time: A Dieter Roth Retrospective,” winner of the International Assn. of Art Critics award for the best single-artist show in New York in 2004. He is currently working on a survey of drawings from the museum’s collection that will open March 29 and a retrospective of Brice Marden’s paintings and drawings, to open in fall 2006.

“The scale of the Roth and Marden retrospectives are beyond the reach of the Hammer,” Garrels said. “But that’s fine with me. It’s not about scale. It’s about the creative edge, the relevance, the insights you get from working with an artist, organizing something and putting it into a public arena. And big is not always better.”