NYT: With Hammer and tongs in L.A.
Ann Philbin transforms the Hammer Museum, inside and out, with a $90 million renovation 24 years in the making
By Adam Nagourney, The New York Times
March 24
LOS ANGELES — When Ann Philbin was asked by a Los Angeles artist if she would consider leaving The Drawing Center in New York in the late 1990s to run the Hammer Museum here, she demurred. She had never even heard of the Hammer Museum.
And when, at the urging of the artist, Lari Pittman, she agreed to at least visit the museum while on a West Coast trip in 1998, her heart sank at the sight of the pink marble lobby in the Occidental Petroleum Building that led to the adjoining museum that Occidental’s founder, Armand Hammer, had built eight years earlier to display his collection of old masters and other paintings. “I’m a contemporary art person, and I love architecture and design so the place kind of hurt my eyes,” Philbin recalled.
But now, 24 years after Philbin agreed to sign on as the museum’s director for what she had once thought would be a five-year stint in Los Angeles, the Hammer is finally concluding a $90 million stop-and-start renovation project with the opening of a prominententrance that integrates the museum onto the streetscape of Wilshire Boulevard, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. …
Read the full story of the Hammer’s renovation at The New York Times
