LOS ANGELES — Allison Agsten, the dynamic and intrepid curator of Public Engagement at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, has built her department from scratch. After three years spent designing and refining the Public Engagement department’s infrastructure and mission, she is now poised to make a real impact in a field that is still new and innovative in the museum world. Agsten talks with ARTINFO’s Yasmine Mohseni about her unorthodox career path, her passion for gaming, and which L.A. artist she’s dying to work with.

You have had an atypical and non-traditional career trajectory for someone in the curatorial field. Tell me a bit about your background.

I interned at CNN during college and they offered me a job – it was a different time when you could actually have a job lined up after college – and I worked my way to being a producer. Most people [in Los Angeles] were covering movies and television, but I was especially interested in the arts, so I was able to carve out a little niche for myself. I got to do some really great stories on museums, the symphony and the theatre, and I spent a week doing a big production at LACMA in 2005 when their King Tut show was on [“Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs”]. Then LACMA had a job opening as Communications Manager, and they knew me, they knew my work ethic, and it’s not terribly uncommon for journalists to make the switch from journalism to PR. I’d always longed to be even more immersed in the arts than I already was. Michael Govan came on board shortly after I was hired — he’s such an incredible visionary and force, and under his leadership, I was able to explore and to do some things museums weren’t really doing yet, especially digitally. Things that, five years ago, felt very provocative. I initiated Twitter at the museum and the first Spanish language Twitter account for a museum. So we had the first bilingual Twitter account, in English and Spanish. 

How did the Hammer position come about?

When the position [of curator of Public Engagement] became open, I think that the Hammer was probably looking for someone with a traditional curatorial background. But somebody with that background maybe didn’t have some of the administrative experience or production background that I had. All of these things coalesced to make me a candidate that fit. It seems atypical or unusual on paper, but I know how to work within a museum and I understand that structure pretty well. I actually think that [my production background] is the most helpful for making things happen.

 Your mandate is public engagement — what does that mean?

In 2009, when we got the Irvine Foundation Grant [which led to the founding of the Public Engagement department], it was to create a new kind of visitor experience that included not just artists’ projects, but starting a visitor’s services department. I think this is another reason why I probably ultimately got the job — the person needed to not just have curatorial skills but to have a level of administrative savvy and understanding to create this department from scratch. [At the beginning, my job] was hiring a staff, creating a manual, figuring out what credit card machines would synch with our bank, money handling procedure — I mean, everything! So, when we originally were thinking about working with artists, the idea was to bring artists in to help us think through important decisions. We found with our first artist residency, “Machine Project,” that as much as we thought artists wanted to help us solve our problems, they actually wanted to complicate the problems or examine other problems entirely. I think that we had maybe overprescribed what we thought the boundaries of their work would be. Over time, it has evolved. I would say that now all of the public engagement we present values exchange between the visitor and the museum and the visitor and the artist.

What is striking is the massive learning curve you had – not only did you start a new job, but also a new department and a new iteration of the artist-museum-visitor exchange.

And for so much of the work there is no precedent. There’s nobody I can call to say, “I’m working with this artist [Lisa Anne Auerbach, “United We Stand,” 2012], who wants to put sequins on the backs of the blazers of our security guards. Do you have any idea who can do the sequins? What do your guards think when you want to sequin their blazers?” There’s not a lot of reference for this exact kind of work within museums. There are artists who have been doing incredible work in the realm of social practice for a long time, but many museums haven’t exercised this muscle a lot, including ours.

The 2010 collaboration with “Machine Project”was your department’s first major project. What was that like?

It’s the most intensive residency that we’ve had in Public Engagement so far. We did 80 programs or so in a year. Things like micro concerts, five-minute live concerts held in the coatroom, were totally easy and ran themselves because we did them so extensively. With many of them, though, it feels like you’re reinventing the wheel. It ranged from music – like a live personal soundtrack where you could check out a guitarist who would walk you through the galleries – to a sleepover at the museum. We had a “Microscope Day” where we got access to the newest model of microscopes not released to the market yet.