Michael Maltzan's long-awaited overhaul of the UCLA Hammer Museum has set a date for its public debut after more than two decades of work undertaken at the behest of director Ann Philbin.
March 26th will mark the completed transformation of the 33-year-old Westside institution, with a new facade, lobby, and entrance from Wilshire Boulevard welcoming visitors into its enhanced spaces while acting like a gateway to Westwood Village and the university campus beyond.
Maltzan said: “We had a clear vision of what the Hammer should become, from the moment we began designing the master plan for what was then a cloistered, private museum of historic European painting. That clarity sustained us through a process that demanded extraordinary persistence and inventiveness, because we needed to work in phases as we reshaped, reconfigured, opened, and expanded the Hammer. This was truly a case of building the airplane while you were flying it. I can’t think of any other client that would have had the daring and imagination to carry it off.”
The project also incorporates two floors of the adjacent midcentury office tower designed by architect Claud Beelman for the Occidental Petroleum corporation in 1962.
In those spaces, which will feature Rita McBride’s Particulates installation from the Hammer’s permanent collection, Maltzan worked to create a new 5,600-square-foot gallery that is complemented by a 900-foot sculpture terrace set to feature the re-installation of Sanford Biggers’ monumental Oracale sculpture first featured at Rockefeller Center in 2021.
Maltzan says the Wilshire and Glendon gallery will eventually connect to the museum’s lobby, with new vertical signage and a transparent facade bringing together the now contiguous block-long space for the display of “highly visible” large-scale artworks.
Overall, the master plan added some 40,000-square-feet of space to the museum’s inventory while increasing gallery capacity by a total of 60 percent. The project was begun in 2000 and completed with the help of a $180 million capital campaign. More information about the museum's transformation can be found here.
3 Comments
It's unclear to me from this press release how all this Resnick money will actually improve the institution as a space for experiencing and understanding the artwork. Unfortunately this feels like another vanity capital campaign whose real function is helping conceal the Resnick's sort of despicable, unethical(and certainly unsustainable) business practices.
Totally appreciate the broader point about the unending and wasteful arms-race of capital projects in culture sector but also "60% more gallery space" seems like a significant improvement? Assuming they have a larger collection they haven't had room to display more of and it won't just be used for "special" exhibits...
That last embed/link is giving me a 404. Appears may have been changed to https://hammer.ucla.edu/museum-transformation ?
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