MoMA Curator to Take Reins at Drawing Center

NEW YORK — The Drawing Center, a small, non-collecting museum in Manhattan’s SoHo district, has announced that its new executive director will be the longtime New York curator Laura Hoptman.

Hoptman, 56, is currently curator in the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. She has previously occupied curatorial positions in the Modern’s drawing department and at the New Museum. On Sept. 10 she will become the center’s fifth executive director, succeeding Brett Littman, who held the post for 11 years and left in April to become head of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City. In 2012, Littman oversaw a redesign of the center’s two-level space on Wooster Street.

Speaking for the center’s board its co-chairwomen, Andrea Crane and Amy Gold, said Hoptman’s “unparalleled expertise and international experience will add extraordinary new vision and leadership to our venerable New York institution.”

Hoptman, referring to the present as “a time of cultural gigantism,” said, “Smaller, more focused institutions are freer to introduce unfamiliar, speculative, or challenging material, to drill down on specific mediums or ideas, and to create diverse programming that is relevant, even urgent to a larger cultural conversation.”

The Drawing Center has built its reputation on specializing in such material. Founded in 1977 by Martha Beck (1938-2014), a curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, it is one of three small, non-collecting nonprofits, called alternative spaces, that sprang up in the decade and it has managed to persist in downtown Manhattan despite rising rents. (The other two are White Columns and Artists Space, which have both found new, affordable quarters this year, as has a fourth space, the Swiss Institute, founded in SoHo in 1986.)

The Drawing Center, which attracts 55,000 visitors annually, covered a broader span than the others. It has expanded the history of drawing with, for example, an exhibition of Victor Hugo’s little-known ink studies, while also emphasizing the medium’s flexible role in contemporary art, with surveys of Terry Winters (through Aug. 12), Judith Bernstein and Rashid Johnson, among many.

It showed the drawings of architects including Inigo Jones of 17th-century England and the postwar American Lebbeus Woods; of American Plains Indians and tattoo artists; and of the Spanish master chef Ferran Adrià. It exhibited tantric drawings, and Shaker gift drawings and the little scraps of paper on which Emily Dickinson scribbled drafts of poems. Hoptman said in a recent telephone interview that it had “the ingredients to take it to another level.” She expressed an interest in broadening its audience and exploring lesser-known corners of drawing, especially its “connectivity to vernacular culture.”

Hoptman began her career in the late 1980s as an assistant curator at the Bronx Museum, later doing graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She worked in the Modern’s department of drawings from 1996 to 2001, organizing the ambitious “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions,” which featured eight artists who often worked representationally and in large scale. She was director of the 54th Carnegie International, in Pittsburgh in 2004, and between 2006 and 2010 was curator at the New Museum. After returning to the Modern in 2010 she oversaw large exhibitions devoted to Bruce Connor, Kai Althoff and Isa Genzken as well as the museum’s first survey of contemporary painting in more than half a century, “The Forever Now.”

In the telephone interview, Hoptman said she welcomed the change “from giant to miniature,” adding that New York’s alternative spaces tend to have a “big impact and small footprints” that enable them to “act with greater freedom, closer to the ground.” At the same time she heralded the Drawing Center’s “museum-like level of seriousness and scholarship” and also its uniqueness as the only institution in the United States devoted exclusively to drawing. She spoke of drawing as the most accessible medium, one that “breaks through all cultural borders.” She added, “It is the medium of everyone and everything as far as I’m concerned.”