Connie Butler is the chief curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles where she has organized numerous exhibitions including “Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence” (2019), “Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space” (2017), and the biennial of Los Angeles artists “Made in LA” (2014). Butler has long been interested in feminism and art, curating numerous show on women artists. When she was the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at MOMA (2006-2013), she co-curated ”Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988,” the first major Lygia Clark retrospective in the United States (2014). She organized the groundbreaking survey “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles where she was curator from 1996-2006. In 2020, Butler received a fellowship from The Center for Curatorial Leadership as well as the Bard College Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.

Join Manetti Shrem Museum Scholar-in-Residence Sampada Aranke and Curator at Large Dan Nadel and the Graduate Group in Cultural Studies for an overview of the exhibition, with an emphasis on the curators’ research and collaboration.

Opening January 2023 at the Manetti Shrem Museum, “Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985” features paintings and films by the UC Davis professor emeritus. These works depict scenes of antiblack violence, heteromasculinity and abject social conditions as well as utopian visions, questions of self-making and formal narrative studies of painting and film. Henderson’s ambidextrous practice examines and offers new ideas about Black life in the visual languages of protest, Afro-futurism and surrealism, challenging the protocols and propriety of art-making in the 20th century.

Taking inspiration from the exhibition “From Moment to Movement: Picturing Protest in the Kramlich Collection,” on view at the Manetti Shrem Museum, this virtual conversation addresses the vital role of […]