Cornelia H. "Connie" Butler (born 1 February 1963)[1] is an American museum curator, author, and art historian. Since 2023, Butler is the Director of MoMA PS1.[2] From 2013 to 2023, she was the Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.[3][4][5]
Early life and education
A California native,[6] Butler is a 1980 graduate of Marlborough School,[7][8] and a 1984 graduate of Scripps College.[9]
Career
From 2006 to 2013, Butler served as the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Prior to that, she was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), from 1996 to 2006.[10] Butler also held curatorial positions at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York; Artists Space in New York City; and the Des Moines Arts Center.[11] She was hired as curator of drawings for MoMA in October 2005, when she was still working on developing her WACK! project for MOCA.[12]
Her multimedia exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution dealt with international feminist art of the 1970s.[13][4] The exhibit was shown at The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in the summer of 2007. When curating WACK!, reviewer Carolyn Stuart noted that Butler included works by 124 women artists, and several male collaborators, and also included several works of art "with little or no obvious feminist content", or works not described as feminist by their creators.[14] She co-published a book about the exhibition in 2007.[15] She was interviewed for the film !Women Art Revolution.[16]
She co-authored the book From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74, which was published in 2013.[17] In July 2013, she began overseeing the entirety of Hammer Museum's curatorial department, including "developing and organizing exhibitions, building the Hammer Contemporary Collection, and overseeing the Hammer’s artist residency program and artist council."[10] In May 2014 at MoMA, she co-curated the first major Lygia Clark retrospective to be held in the US.[10] Working for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles as chief curator, in April 2016 she secured a donation of street photography by Daido Moriyama, the world's largest collection.[18] In 2019, she curated an exhibit on Lari Pittman. In 2020, she was developing an exhibition on feminism called Witch Hunt.[19] The release was pushed back to February 2021.[20]
