Hammer Museum’s Connie Butler looks back — and ahead

The Hammer Museum at UCLA plans to reopen April 17, which signals the end of a 13-month waiting game amid the COVID-19 pandemic. With safety protocols in place, the museum can reopen at 25% capacity to visitors with timed tickets, allowing the public to finally see “Made in L.A. 2020: a version,” the acclaimed biennial that spotlights emerging Los Angeles artists and, for the first time, extends to galleries at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

“We’re not allowed to have big gatherings or big crowds,” said Connie Butler, the Hammer’s chief curator. “It will be quiet and a really nice time to be in the galleries.”

Butler, who co-curated the second iteration of “Made in L.A.” in 2014, says the biennial “proves … that Los Angeles is such a deep and vast art community right now — actually, it’s many different art communities — and it can really support a show that is a core sample of contemporary art in L.A. every two years.”

In the nine years since the biennial’s premiere, Los Angeles has furthered its reputation as a global nexus of contemporary art, and “Made in L.A.” has helped shape that perception through its focus on emerging artists. The current exhibition is organized by independent curators Myriam Ben Salah and Lauren Mackler, with Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, the Hammer’s assistant curator of performance. The team made about 300 studio visits, Butler said.

“There was a time, and I remember it many years ago when I was a curator at [the Museum of Contemporary Art], when you almost felt like if you made enough studio visits, you could actually visit every single artist in Los Angeles. And that is vastly not the case anymore,” she said.