The Palisades and Eaton fires erupted on Zoë Ryan’s second day as director of the Hammer Museum at UCLA. Her family was in Philadelphia, and she barely knew her new colleagues, but she was suddenly responsible for an institution where staff members were being evacuated and employees or their relatives lost homes.
It was an abrupt test for a leader succeeding Ann Philbin, who retired in 2024 after transforming the Hammer over a quarter-century through inventive exhibitions and high-profile expansion. Hammer board chair Eric Esrailian recalled that Ryan immediately focused on the safety of the staff and museum community.
“She conveyed empathy in that situation and reassured people: This is affecting everyone simultaneously,” he said. “It forced her to immediately reach out to the surrounding community … and to try to build some relationships.”
Nearly two years in, Ryan is using the platform Philbin built as the foundation for the Hammer’s next era. At an institution with a fiscal operating budget of about $30.4 million, she is seeking to place educational initiatives on equal footing with exhibitions, pursuing collaborations across the city, and positioning the Hammer as the anchor of a Westside arts district.
“I take seriously the Hammer being a catalyst for art and ideas,” said Ryan, who grew up in Kent, England, and was curator of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago before leading the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. “I want us to lean into that. That means supporting artists; it means supporting staff in doing really bold projects.”
Ryan sees the Hammer as “making the art history of the future,” an ambition reflected in two fall retrospectives that bring greater attention to women long overlooked: the largest U.S. survey of Lebanese artist Huguette Caland, which opened Sept. 27, and the first major museum survey of Jamaican-born geometric abstractionist Mavis Pusey, which opened over the weekend. (Pusey has another exhibit at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, running through Jan. 3.)
Artist Tala Madani, co-chair of the museum’s artist council, which meets regularly with institutional leadership, said Ryan’s arrival has been seamless in that she has not seen “a notable shift” between Ryan and her predecessor. “Some people come in [and] start slashing everything,” she said. “There’s no need for that, and it’s not happening.” Madani also praised Ryan for “really trying to hear and listen.”
Los Angeles County Museum of Art Chief Executive Michael Govan sees Ryan’s opportunity as different from the one Philbin encountered 25 years earlier. By building the Hammer’s audience, programs and campus, he said, Philbin left Ryan “a robust infrastructure.”
“Annie couldn’t have done what Zoë’s going to do because Annie couldn’t have built the program, built the infrastructure and then [executed] it [before she retired],” he said.
Among Ryan’s most consequential early steps has been putting a new leadership team in place. She hired Michael Wellen as chief curator and Regan Pro into a newly created position as chief of learning, engagement and research. They join Naoko Takahatake, director and chief curator of the museum’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, in helping shape the Hammer’s artistic and educational programs.
Pro, who joined the museum in March after positions at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and the Seattle Art Museum, said Ryan’s mandate is to elevate learning and public programs to the level of exhibitions. Ryan is thinking about “a collective strategy and approach that centers [both] learning and engagement for all audiences,” she said.
Alongside its longstanding classroom-in-residence program, in which fourth- through sixth-grade classes spend a week at the museum, the Hammer piloted its classroom partnership program under Ryan. It provides yearlong professional development to Title I school teachers, who bring museum-developed arts curricula into their classrooms.
“As art gets stripped out of the public school system, we’re there supporting teachers,” Ryan said. “It’s not a hundred students; it’s now thousands of students that have access to these resources.”
Philbin oversaw a two-decade,$90-million renovation by Michael Maltzan Architecture that increased gallery space by 60% and added an outdoor sculpture terrace. Ryan is now seeking to turn the museum and its courtyard into a functional “town square,” with places for people to congregate. These include the Nook, a ground-floor room where visitors can make art, read or study. Her goal, she said, is to offer a “radical welcome.”
Ryan’s effort to make the Hammer more accessible inside its walls is paired with a broader commitment to supporting artists across Los Angeles. She has taken on oversight of the Hammer’s participation in Mohn Art Collective, or MAC3, a collection of more than 400 works donated by philanthropists Jarl and Pamela Mohn and jointly owned and managed by the Hammer, LACMA and the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Jarl Mohn recalled that, weeks into the job, Ryan joined her fellow directors at Frieze Los Angeles to scout work for the collection. After they selected a piece by established L.A. artist Edgar Arceneaux, Ryan urged the group to revisit MAC3’s mandate to support a broad range of local artists. They also acquired a work by Shaniqwa Jarvis, a photographer with a two-decade career who was beginning to enter major museum collections.
“Zoë raised her hand as the newbie, saying, ‘Isn’t this the mission? Isn’t this what we’re supposed to be doing?’” Mohn said. “And it made an impression on me.” Mohn, a longtime underwriter of the museum’s flagship Made in L.A. biennial, said Ryan is extending the program’s impact by returning to participating artists for broader examinations of their work. Ryan calls the approach “pulling threads” from the Hammer’s past. The Caland survey and next spring’s Joey Terrill exhibition — artists featured in Made in L.A. in 2016 and 2023, respectively — are examples of what Mohn jokingly called “line extensions” of the biennial.
“That’s an innovation of [Ryan’s], which I think is brilliant, and a real sign of the creative thinking that she’s bringing to the Hammer,” he said.
Mohn also pointed to Ryan’s decision to pair Wellen, who recently worked at the Tate Modern, with MOCA curator José Luis Blondet for Made in L.A. 2027 — scheduled to open Oct. 10, 2027— as another sign of her collaborative approach. Bringing in a veteran curator from another local institution, Mohn said, demonstrated a commitment to “getting the best minds together.”
Overseeing an endowment of about $150.3 million, Ryan is prioritizing annual support for free admission and programming while raising endowment funds for staff positions. She is also planning the Hammer’s contribution to the LA28 Cultural Olympiad, the regional arts program accompanying the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Further ahead, Ryan is among those envisioning an arts corridor stretching from the Hammer through the UCLA campus and a broader Westside cultural district connecting the Fowler Museum, Nimoy Theater, Getty Center and Skirball Cultural Center, as well as the Westwood Village and Bruin theaters. She said conversations have begun about creating — or formally naming — a Westside Arts District anchored by the Hammer.
With a Metro D Line station planned nearby, Ryan expects the Hammer to become a point of entry to the neighborhood. “We’re going to be the gateway for Westwood,” she said.
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