Hauser & Wirth has announced art critic and curator Ingrid Schaffner as its curatorial senior director. Formerly curator of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, Schaffner will be based at the megagallery’s Los Angeles outpost, where she will organize exhibitions featuring its roster of West Coast artists and serve as a writer and editor for its in-house publication, Ursula.
Schaffner, whose curatorial practice engages issues of feminism, representation, and alternate modernisms, joins Hauser & Wirth following fifteen years directing curatorial programs at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art, where she began as an adjunct and ultimately rose to chief curator. While there, she tripled the museum’s yearly exhibitions and helmed its 2014 fiftieth anniversary exhibition, “ICA@50: Pleasing Artists and Publics Since 1963,” which showcased fifty new projects inspired by the institution’s history. Following her tenure at ICA, she organized the Fifty-Seventh Carnegie International at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art in 2018. In 2020, she was appointed curator at the Chinati Foundation, where she oversaw its permanent collection, residency program, and publications. Additionally, she has written criticism for publications including Artforum, Art in America, Parkett, and Frieze, and has contributed to exhibition catalogues on numerous artists including Marlene Dumas, Josiah McElheny, and Bruce Nauman.
Schaffner’s move to the blue-chip gallery follows Kate Fowle’s departure from MoMA PS1 and Tanya Barson’s exit from the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, both for Hauser & Wirth, reflecting an ongoing trend of curators leaving museums to join the ranks of their commercial gallery counterparts. Of her appointment, Hauser & Wirth partner and executive director Stacen Berg in a statement said, “We’re thrilled that Ingrid is joining Hauser & Wirth as Curatorial Senior Director, bringing her experience and expertise as a curator and writer, her noted talent for collaborating closely with artists, and her very special sensibility to the gallery.”
