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October 6, 2004<,br> Armand Hammer's Orphan Museum Turns Into Cinderella in Los Angeles
By HILARIE M. SHEETS

Treated as a private folly to house the art collection of Armand Hammer, who died days after it opened in 1990, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles had a troubled childhood.

This orphan's early days were darkened by a sense of indirection and by lawsuits over Hammer's use of Occidental Petroleum money to create the museum. Prospects seemed to improve in 1994 with a $30.8 million infusion from the sale of Leonardo's Codex Hammer and a decision by Occidental Petroleum to have U.C.L.A. manage the museum. Yet the Hammer limped on with no clear identity, serving chiefly as a venue for staid traveling shows.

No more. Today the Armand Hammer, on Wilshire Boulevard in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, is considered one of the city's hottest cultural attractions, with a keen eye for emerging artistic talent and a busy schedule of "destination evenings" that routinely draw crowds to the museum for readings, concerts and films.

The museum's turnaround is widely credited to the Hammer's director, Ann Philbin, who resolved from the outset to immerse the museum in the here and now of contemporary art.

"I walked into the space and had one of those eureka moments of, wow, I know what this should be," said Ms. Philbin, who was hired in 1999. A Hammer search committee was impressed by her success in revitalizing another once-sleepy institution, the Drawing Center in Manhattan.

Ms. Philbin, who at the Drawing Center gave contemporary stars like Kara Walker, Chris Ofili, Shazia Sikander and Jack Pierson their first breaks, quickly recognized that the Hammer could fill an underserved niche.

"At the same time that this incredible art scene was developing in Los Angeles with all these young artists coming out of school," she said, "there really wasn't an institution that was taking care of them. The galleries were carrying most of the burden of showing what was happening. We stepped into that void."

Since Ms. Philbin took over, yearly attendance has more than doubled, topping 100,000 visitors a year.

A current example of "taking care" is "The Undiscovered Country," a show that puts art of the current generation in the context of recent art history. Organized by Russell Ferguson, whom Ms. Philbin was quick to hire from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, it traces the resurgence of representational painting since the 1960's and 70's in the work of some 25 artists, including Edgar Bryan, Peter Doig, Laura Owens, Gerhard Richter and Vija Celmins.

The museum also organizes large invitational shows of artists whom most people - including the dealers - have never heard of. The next one, titled "Thing," is devoted to new sculpture in Los Angeles and opens on Feb. 6. And viewers can usually take in at least two Hammer Projects, a series of frequently changing installations by emerging artists that Ms. Philbin initiated when she arrived.

There have been some 40 of these during her tenure, including current shows by Rob Voerman (through Oct. 17) and Santiago Cucullu (through Jan. 9). "We give ourselves license to say this is not necessarily the next Picasso but rather this is worthy of consideration at this moment in time," said Ms. Philbin, who credits the endless studio visits of James Elaine, a curator she brought with her from the Drawing Center.

The museum has also rediscovered once-prominent artists who had dropped off the map, including Lee Mullican, Robert Overby and Lee Bontecou. A Bontecou retrospective organized in concert with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago was a particularly big critical and popular success. (It closed last month at the Museum of Modern Art's temporary Queens location.)

"The Bontecou exhibition brought us to another level," said Ms. Philbin, who had longed to show the reclusive artist since her days at the Drawing Center, and leaped on an invitation from Elizabeth Smith, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, to help organize the retrospective.

The Hammer's revival has won the admiration of contemporary art dealers across the country, including Matthew Marks in New York. When he first heard that Ms. Philbin was taking the Hammer job, Mr. Marks recounts, he was shocked. "Five years ago the Hammer barely existed on the radar screen outside of L.A.," Mr. Marks said. "I had only vaguely heard of it, and I certainly had never been there.

"It's almost as if she's created a new institution. Now it's a place that all the artists would like their touring shows to go to. That's obviously a tribute to her."

When Ms. Philbin was approached by the search committee, she said, she almost dismissed the idea. "The truth of the matter is I wasn't looking for a job and I didn't want to leave New York," said Ms. Philbin, 52, a veteran East Coaster. She spent her early youth outside Boston and moved to Washington when her father, a lawyer and cousin of Regis Philbin, went to work for the Kennedy administration.

After graduating with degrees in painting and art history from the University of New Hampshire, she got her master's degree in arts administration at New York University and stayed.

"So when I went to the initial interview," she said, "I was just sort of winging it and saying what I thought would be a great idea for the Hammer, not thinking this would happen."

But then she visited the museum and had her epiphany. One thing she realized was the enormous potential benefit in the Hammer's being part of U.C.L.A., with its concentration of artists who teach there, including John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Catherine Opie, Lari Pittman, Nancy Rubin and James Welling.

"When we were brainstorming about our mission, we thought it's our job to be the R&D arm for the university in the arts, to push the boundaries of what's happening in the world at the moment, which means contemporary art," Ms. Philbin said. "But it also means re-evaluating art history and what the canon is."

In practice, that may play out in dialogues like that last year between "International Paper," a show of contemporary drawings, and "Inventing the Print," which is installed next to it and is drawn from the 45,000 works on paper dating from the Renaissance to today in the university's Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. Or in using the lobby as a gallery space for huge contemporary projects, so that a visitor coming to see the van Goghs and Rembrandts in Armand Hammer's collection, some of which is always on view, encounters the work of at least two young artists who may never have shown in a museum before.

Since the university moved its visiting artists lecture series from the campus studios to the Hammer, artists like Robert Gober and Lawrence Weiner have been drawing crowds of 500, up from around 50 previously.

"All of us faculty really use the Hammer as part of our teaching, which never happened before Annie," said Ms. Opie, noting that one teacher designed a class around the photography exhibition "The Last Picture Show" last spring.

Less conventional programming has also drawn big crowds, like 2,000 people who packed the museum's outdoor courtyard to hear Gore Vidal speak about the Iraq war the night before the bombing began in March 2003. About 1,200 turned out to hear the comedian Margaret Cho and the rapper Chuck D in "Conversation," a series of dialogues between public figures from different fields.

"It's become a public gathering space," said Ms. Philbin, who said she realized when she moved to Los Angeles that people who spend hours each day driving on freeways might feel more isolated than New Yorkers - and embrace the chance to experience the arts communally. "I think L.A. needs that more than any city in the country," she said.

People lie around the courtyard on blankets for the Hammer's drive-in-style film series, and almost every evening a reading, concert or voter-registration party is getting Angelenos out of their cars.

Such "destination evenings" were conceived as a way to appeal to students at U.C.L.A. and other schools who had not been coming to the museum." "Sometimes you have to go through the back door to get them to pay attention," Ms. Philbin said.

A $5 million gift this year from Audrey Wilder, the widow of Billy Wilder, enabled the museum to resume building a 300-seat theater left unfinished at Hammer's death. It will be an up to the minute home for the university's film and television archive.

"My goal is to have the kind of situation where you don't even have to know what's going on but you say, 'Let's just go the Hammer,' " said Ms. Philbin, who also hopes to attract a major restaurant that could be a magnet for art world socializing.

Alternative spaces are a template for Ms. Philbin, who had her first professional experiences in the late 70's during internships at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and at Artists Space in New York - a time when Cindy Sherman was the receptionist, Jenny Holzer was having her first show and Robert Longo and Richard Prince were hanging out at lunchtime.

"Those were totally formative times for me," she said. "That really explains why I can't get away from the artist as the central figure."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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