ASHTON COOPER

ASHTON COOPER ENTERED the art world as a journalist before deciding to enrich her practice with an institutional perspective. Now, the Hammer Museum fellow and art historian has a front-row curatorial seat for the shaping of the museum’s fall exhibition, “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living.”

As the Hammer Museum’s current Luce Curatorial Fellow, you are immersed in one of the world’s greatest experimental and academic institutions. I remember one of the first shows you curated in 2016 at the Knockdown Center in Queens, a cultural venue also prized for risk-taking. “Read My Lips” was really important for me. It was a two-person exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Loren Britton, as well as prints and video by Kerry Downey. In that show, I was really thinking through what it means to flirt with the refusal of visibility of queer and transgender artists, and how that translates to art projects. In conjunction with the exhibition, I staged a roundtable symposium on the notion of queer abstraction, which was emergent at the time. That transcript ended up being published in a scholarly journal and continues to circulate in new conversations.

The roundtable was recently quoted in a book called Trans Care [by Hil Malatino], published in 2020. The past 10 years or so have made it clear