Walter Hopps

Walter (Chico) Hopps (May 3, 1932 – March 20, 2005) was an American museum director and curator of contemporary art. His obituary in the Washington Post described him as a "sort of a gonzo museum director -- elusive, unpredictable, outlandish in his range, jagged in his vision, heedless of rules."

Hopps was born in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, California. In 1955, he opened the Syndell Gallery, where his exhibitions included Action 1 and Action 2. In 1957, he founded the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles in partnership with Ed Kienholz, leaving in 1962 to become the director of the Pasadena Museum of Art, now Norton Simon Museum, where he mounted the first museum retrospectives of Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, as well as the first overview of American Pop Art, New Painting of Common Objects. His unconventional administrative skills led to him being fired in 1967. Notoriously unavailable when needed, his amused, bemused, and frustrated staff at the Pasadena Museum created buttons reading "Walter Hopps will be here in 20 minutes." These buttons were recreated at the Corcoran Gallery during his tenure there. Leaving Pasadena, he became the director of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. In 1970, Hopps was appointed director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, of which the Washington Gallery of Modern Art had been a short-lived subsidiary, and was there until 1972. He was the U.S. commissioner of the 1972 Venice Biennale. From 1972 to 1979, he was curator of 20th-Century American Art at the Smithsonian's National Collection of Fine Arts (now the National Museum of American Art). He commented to an interviewer about that period, saying that working for bureaucrats at NCFA was "like moving through an atmosphere of Seconal."

He was a master at "curating outside the box." Shows such as "Thirty-Six Hours," 1978, at MOTA (the Museum of Temporary Art) in which he hung the work of all comers over a one-and-a-half-day period, which brought a seemingly endless procession of artists, both well-known and totally unknown, were impressarial events that enlivened the art community in which they occurred.

In 1979, Hopps became a consultant to the Menil Foundation, becoming director in 1980. He was the director of the Menil Collection museum when it opened in 1987, but was eventually demoted to curator of 20th-century art. He died in Los Angeles.

In 2001, the Menil Foundation established the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.

External links

• Interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist in Artforum, Feb 1996
• Reflections on Walter Hopps in Los Angeles by Ken Allan in X-TRA : Contemporary Art Quarterly