The Hammer Museum is not just any university art museum. Although still affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), it has advisory boards full of major collectors and artists. It is located off campus. And over the past 25 years, director Ann Philbin has transformed it from an oil magnate’s dusty vanity museum into a dynamic contemporary art destination.
But campus life came to the museum this Saturday (May 4), the evening of the Hammer’s annual Gala in the Garden, in the form of a faculty protest outside the building that confronted guests as they entered the parking garage in their Teslas and Mercedes EQSs. . Protesters called for amnesty for UCLA students arrested in a police sweep of pro-Palestinian camps on campus this week and for the removal of the university chancellor with chants of, “Hey, ho ho, Gene Block has got to go.”
Block did not actually attend the gala, which was well attended by artists (including Charles Gaines, Mary Weatherford, Andrea Bowers and Glenn Kaino), museum leaders (Thelma Golden, Michael Govan, Jessica Morgan and Connie Butler) and some Hollywood figures ( Steven Spielberg, Kate Capshaw, Jane Fonda, Keanu Reeves and Owen Wilson) among the approximately 700 guests. In the first speech of the evening, Jodie Foster and her wife, artist Alexandra Hedison, set the tone by recognizing the protests on campus and the importance of freedom of expression, before returning to the task at hand: honoring Hammer CEO Annie Philbin, who plans to retire in November after 25 years of leadership.
And if the protest didn’t make it abundantly clear how challenging it can be to run a museum in the 21st century, several speeches from artists did. Philbin’s longtime friend Robert Gober discussed her history of AIDS activism when she headed the Drawing Center in New York, at a time of deadly government inaction. Lari Pittman, who helped recruit Philbin to the museum, remembered it for her as “a dark, dying, and historically anachronistic place—also a “complete fixer upper,” noting that she found “artists in this community the continuity of 25 damn years” unlike other institutions in the city with a rapid succession of leaders (an obvious joke at the Museum of Contemporary Art). Kara Walker, who made her New York debut thirty years ago at the Drawing Center under Philbin, called Philbin “a tough bastard who doesn’t take anything from anyone.”
Other tributes came from writer and sometime curator Hilton Als, artist Mark Bradford, Ford Foundation chairman Darren Walker and Will Ferrell, who identified himself as a “street artist” – “stripper!” shouted a heckler, or friend, in a nutty roast that provided some much-needed comic relief. “I’ve been sitting at my table listening to everyone going on about how great Annie Philbin is,” he said. “And I think to myself, are they talking about the same monster I know?” He took the piece as far, perhaps further, than it could go.
Philbin’s own speech briefly addressed “the violent clashes on the campus of UCLA” and reaffirmed the Hammer’s mission as a forum for “dialogue around some of the most vexing and difficult topics of our time” before moving on to describe the museum’s work supporting “hundreds, maybe even thousands, of great artists.” More than once in tears, Philbin ended her speech by thanking the many museum directors in attendance, with a special shout-out to Connie Butler, who left a position as chief curator of the Hammer to direct MoMA PS1 in New York. The final nod went to Philbin’s wife, communications guru Cynthia Wornham, who brought people to their feet.
Philbin announced that the gala raised $2.5 million, the largest net raised to date. There was no official comment on it the search is now underway for the next director, which will be led by the Isaacson firm, Miller, but there is a lot of talk about it at the dinner table. You heard many variations on the same theme: it is difficult to imagine the Hammer without Annie. San Jose Museum of Art director S. Sayre Batton made another point. “What a nice job for the next one,” she said. “Everything is in perfect order.”