An open-arm welcome of artworks

The UCLA Hammer Museum has received an estimated $1-million gift of more than 80 contemporary artworks, significantly expanding its collection of photography and other works on paper.

The donation of drawings, prints, videos and mixed-media works, as well as photographs, is from Santa Monica gallery owner Patrick Painter and his wife, Soo Jin Jeong-Painter. It includes large groups of works by Roy Arden, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Williams.

Also part of the gift, made in late 2005, are individual pieces by Peter Doig, Robert Gober, Rodney Graham, Douglas Huebler, Won Ju Lim, Stephen Prina, Collier Schorr, Bruce Nauman, Nancy Rubins and others.

Russell Ferguson, the museum’s chief curator, characterized the Painter donation as eclectic, with much of it “in the category that’s not really called photography, but rather artists working with photography. There’s quite a bit of photography that’s positioned more as a work of art that happens to be photography, rather than coming out of a separate photography tradition.”

The donation includes several serial photographic works, among them Ruscha’s “Rooftops,” 1961-2004, and “Vacant Lots,” 1970-2003; the five-part work “Die Zwei (Spring Break)” by Schorr and the 13-part series “Incident on 9th Street” by Christopher Wool.

The collection also includes an untitled multi-panel photographic work by Doig and Huebler’s multi-part “Variable Piece #43 (Brussels)”; 1974-97 and Variable Piece #70 (In Progress)”; “Global”; “Crocodile Tears II”; and “Rudi Wexler,” 1982.

Ferguson said he considers the donation a complement to the museum’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, a large holding of works on paper, including photography. “We’re really just getting started on making a collection of contemporary work,” he said.

Patrick Painter said he and his wife chose to give to the Hammer because the Painter collection “just kind of organically went with what they are trying to do anyway.”

He added that the Painters have also made smaller donations to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, but “this is a great town with a lot of great institutions, and I think the Hammer should be getting the big ones too.

“My wife and I -- frankly we have this groovy life, if you know what I mean,” Patrick Painter added. “We owe it to the artists we work with, and the people in this town; it’s a way of giving back.”

The Hammer also received a number of year-end gifts from other donors in 2005, including works by Agnes Martin, Sol Lewitt, Milton Avery, Jim Shaw, Johannes Kahrs, Catherine Opie, Ian Patrick, Mike Kelley, Jorge Pardo and others.