The Hammer Museum at UCLA announced today the appointment of Naoko Takahatake as the new Director and Chief Curator of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts; and Paulina Pobocha as the museum’s new Robert Soros Senior Curator. Additionally, Aram Moshayedi, who has been with museum since 2013, will serve as the museum’s Interim Chief Curator, following the recent announcement that current Chief Curator Connie Butler will become the Director of MoMA PS1 this fall.

Takahatake is currently Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where she has overseen and expanded their extensive holdings of works on paper from the 15^th to the 21^st centuries. She has held previous positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In her new role, Takahatake will oversee a unique department contained within the larger Hammer Museum. The Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts was established by UCLA in 1956, following a significant gift of works on paper by German émigré Fred Grunwald. The center and the collection came under the stewardship of the Hammer Museum in 1994, the year the museum became part of UCLA. The collection has grown over the years and now holds more than 45,000 prints, drawings, and photographs from the Renaissance to the present. In 2022, as part of the museum’s transformation in collaboration with architect Michael Maltzan, the Hammer added a new gallery dedicated to works on paper, which frequently exhibits works from the Grunwald Collection, as well as a study center where students, scholars, or other members of the public may make appointments to view works from the vast and varied collection.

Pobocha comes to the Hammer from the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she has been employed since 2008. At MoMA, Pobocha organized or co-organized numerous exhibitions of works by contemporary artists, including Guadalupe Maravilla, Rachel Harrison, Robert Gober, and Claes Oldenberg. At the Hammer, she will play a crucial role in helping to shape the museum’s contemporary collections and exhibitions program.

Moshayedi joined the Hammer in 2013 as a Curator and was named Robert Soros Senior Curator in 2021. While he transitioned to an adjunct role earlier this year, including taking a Curator-in-Residence role at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, Moshayedi will step into an Interim Chief Curator position while the Hammer undergoes a search following the departure of Connie Butler, who held the role since 2013. Moshayedi leads a team of curators that includes Pobocha; Curator Erin Christovale, who has been with the Hammer since 2017; and Curator Pablo José Ramírez, who joined the Hammer earlier this year and is co-curating the upcoming exhibition Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living.

Hammer Museum Director Ann Philbin said, “This is an exciting moment for the Hammer as we welcome Naoko Takahatake and Paulina Pobocha into the fold. I am also grateful to Aram Moshayedi for guiding our curatorial team during this transitional period. I look forward to working with all our new curators and continuing the Hammer’s innovative exhibition program.”

Cynthia Burlingham, the Hammer’s Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, held the additional role of Director of the Grunwald Center since 2005. She added, “I am delighted to welcome my colleague Naoko Takahatake to the Grunwald Center. She is a deeply respected peer in the field of prints and drawings who brings many years of expertise to this role.”

Moshayedi's appointment as Interim Chief Curator position is effective as of September 1. Takahatake will start at the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts on October 16. Pobocha will join the Hammer full-time in January 2024.

About The Curators

Naoko Takahatake
Since 2019, Naoko Takahatake has overseen and expanded the Getty Research Institute’s extensive holdings of works on paper from the 15^th to the 21^st centuries and contributed to the organization of the exhibitions Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics and Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy. Her exhibition “First Came a Friendship”: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L. opens at the GRI in February 2024. Previously, Takahatake was Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with a focus on early modern works on paper. In her tenure, she led a project to reorganize the prints and drawings collection and curated exhibitions such as The German Woodcut: Renaissance and Expressionist Revival; Whistler’s Etchings: An Art of Suggestion; Picasso and his Printers; The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L. (with Leslie Jones, in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington); and, notably, The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy (in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington).

A specialist in Italian print history of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, Takahatake has published and lectured widely on such topics as the technical study of printmaking processes, print publishing, collecting, and historiography. Her catalog on Italian chiaroscuro woodcuts, which presented collaborative research with conservators and scientists, received the IFPDA Book Award and was a finalist for the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award in 2019. She is currently an editorial board member of Print Quarterly and the Getty Research Journal. Takahatake has also held curatorial fellowships at the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the British Museum. She earned a BA from Vassar College and MSt and DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Paulina Pobocha
Paulina Pobocha is an art historian, writer, and curator who specializes in art made between 1960 and today. During her tenure in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), she has organized and co-organized exhibitions including YOU ARE HERE* Contemporary Art in the Garden (2023); Guadalupe Maravilla: Luz y fuerza (2021); Constantin Brancusi Sculpture (2019); The Long Run (2017); Rachel Harrison: Perth Amboy (2016); Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor (2014); and Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store (2013). She has also been central to the conception and display of the Museum’s contemporary collection galleries, with monographic installations such as Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 and, opening this December, Mike Kelley: Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, as well as thematic ones, among them Random-Access Memory: The Rise of Digital Computing at the End of the Cold War, featuring the work of Isa Genzken, Thomas Struth, and Rosemarie Trockel and Assembly which looks at the political potential of assemblage in sculpture by Jimmie Durham, David Hammons, and Cady Noland, on view now. For MoMA, Pobocha is currently working with Thomas Schütte on his forthcoming retrospective exhibition.

In addition to her work at the Museum of Modern Art, Pobocha lectures widely and has served as Critic at the Yale University School of Art. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications and her forthcoming book, Mike Kelley: Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, will accompany MoMA’s presentation of this sculpture in December 2023. 

Pobocha received her BA in art history from the Johns Hopkins University and her MPhil, also in art history, from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Aram Moshayedi
In addition to his role as Interim Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum, Aram Moshayedi is a writer and the current curator-in residence at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. Since joining the Hammer in 2013, he has organized exhibitions and publications including, Lifes; Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019 (with Connie Butler); Stories of Almost Everyone; Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only (with Hamza Walker); All the Instruments Agree: An Exhibition or a Concert; as well as projects by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Marwa Arsanios, Andrea Bowers, Andrea Büttner, Tita Cicognani, Simon Denny, Janiva Ellis, Mario García Torres, Shadi Habib Allah, Maria Hassabi, Jasmina Metwaly, Ho Tzu Nyen, Oliver Payne and Keiichi Tanaami, and Avery Singer. He has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues as well as Artforum, Art in America, BOMB Magazine, Frieze, Metropolis M, Parkett, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and Bidoun, for which he is a contributing editor.

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