Cornelia H. "Connie" Butler is an American museum curator. Butler is currently Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Career
Butler is a 1980 graduate of Marlborough School, and a 1984 graduate of Scripps College. From 2006-2013, she served as the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art. Prior to that, she was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from 1996-2005. Butler also held curatorial positions at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Artists Space, and the Des Moines Arts Center. She was hired as curator of drawings for MoMA in October 2005, when she was still working on developing her WHACK! project for MOCA. She was curator of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from 1996 to 2006. Her multimedia exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution dealt with international feminist art of the 1970s. The exhibit was shown at The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in the summer of 2007. When curating WACK!, reviewer Carolyn Stuart noted that Butler included works by 124 women artists, and several male collaborators, and also included several works of art "with little or no obvious feminist content", or works not described as feminist by their creators. She co-published a book about the exhibition in 2007. She was interviewed for the film !Women Art Revolution. She co-authored the book From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74, which was published in 2013. In July 2013, she began overseeing the entirety of Hammer Museum's curatorial department, including "developing and organizing exhibitions, building the Hammer Contemporary Collection, and overseeing the Hammer’s artist residency program and artist council." In May 2014 at MoMA, she co-curated the first major Lygia Clark retrospective to be held in the US. Working for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles as chief curator, in April 2016 she secured a donation of street photography by Daido Moriyama, the world's largest collection. In 2019, she curated an exhibit on Lari Pittman. In 2020, she was developing an exhibition on feminism called Witch Hunt. The release was pushed back to February 2021. She won the 2020 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from CCS Bard.
Exhibitions
2015: with Jamillah James, Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth
2014: with Michael Ned Holte, Made in L.A. 2014
2014: with Luis Pérez-Oramas, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988
Bradford, Mark, and Cornelia H. Butler. Scorched Earth: Mark Bradford. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2015.
Butler, Cornelia H., Michael Ned Holte, and Judy Fiskin. Made in L.A. 2014. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2014.
Butler, Cornelia H., Luis Pérez Oramas, Antonio Sergio Bessa, and Lygia Clark. Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014.
Butler, Cornelia H., Pip Day, and Peter Plagens. From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard's Numbers Shows, 1969-74. London: Afterall Books, 2012.
Butler, Cornelia and Alexandra Schwartz, eds. Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010.
Butler, Cornelia H., and M. Catherine de Zegher. On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010.
Butler, Cornelia, Bruce Hainley, Nancy Grubb, and Paul Sietsema. Figure 3: Paul Sietsema. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2009.
Butler, Cornelia H., and Lisa Gabrielle Mark. WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007.
De Kooning, Willem, Cornelia H. Butler, and Paul Schimmel. Willem De Kooning: Tracing the Figure. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002.
Butler, Cornelia H., Weng Choy Lee, and Francis Pound. Flight Patterns: Laurence Aberhart... Et Al. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000.
Butler, Cornelia H. Afterimage: Drawing Through Process. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999.
Butler, Cornelia H., and Jessica Bronson. Jessica Bronson. Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Arts, 1998.
Butler, Cornelia H. The Power of Suggestion: Narrative and Notation in Contemporary Drawing. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996.
Butler, Cornelia H., and Lucinda H. Gedeon. Inspired by Nature. Purchase, N.Y.: Neuberger Museum of Art, 1994.
Butler, Cornelia H. Iowa Artists 1988. Des Moines, Iowa: The Center, 1988.
Articles
McCornack, Julia, and Connie Butler. "From Painting to Therapeutic Practice: Conversation about Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988." X-Tra: Contemporary Art Quarterly 17, no. 1 : 4-21.
Butler, Connie. "This Is Art--These People Are Artists: Pacific Standard Time, Conceptual Art, and Other Momentous Events from a Local Point of View." Art Journal 71, no. 1 : 38-57.
Butler, Connie. "That's Guy de Cointet." Artforum International 45, no. 10 : 418-421.
