LAURA HODGSON
Allegra Pesenti has been hired as associate director and senior curator of UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, which is part of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. It marks a homecoming for Pesenti, who was the curator of the Grunwald Center Curator from 2007 to 2013. She had then gone to be chief curator and curator at large at the Menil Collection in Houston and was involved in developing the forthcoming Menil Drawing Institute.
Pesenti’s curatorial credits at the Hammer included “Rachel Whiteread Drawings,” “Zarina: Paper like Skin,” a solo show with Enrico David, and “Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972.” At the Menil, last year, she presented the exhibition “A Weed is a Plant Out of Place” at Lismore Castle in Lismore, Ireland. At the Menil, she presented “Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now,” which also appeared at the Hammer. She is also a member of the staff working on the catalogue raisonné of drawings by Jasper Johns.
“We are delighted that Allegra has returned full time to the Hammer,” Ann Philbin, the museum’s director, said in a statement released to press. “Her expertise in works on paper is a tremendous asset to the Grunwald Center, one of the country’s finest collections of prints, photographs, and artists’ books.” Next year at the Hammer, Pesenti will stage “Stones to Stains: Drawings by Victor Hugo,” which she is co-curating with the Grunwald Center’s director, Cynthia Burlingham.