Allegra Pesenti has been appointed the associate director and senior curator of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, which is located in the Hammer Museum at UCLA. Pesenti returns to the Hammer where she was the Grunwald Center curator from 2007 to 2013.
During her time as the Grunwald Center curator, Pesenti organized a series of major exhibitions including “Gouge: The Modern Woodcut 1870 to Now”, “Rachel Whiteread Drawings”, “Zarina: Paper like Skin”, “Enrico David”, “Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone”, “1955–1972”, and four installations of the Hammer’s Houseguest series. She also developed classes, symposia, and projects with UCLA faculty, students, and other scholars, and made many important acquisitions for the Grunwald Center. After the Hammer, she worked at the Menil Collection and the Menil Drawing Institute until July 2016. In 2015, her exhibition “Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now”, was held at both co-organizing institutions, the Hammer Museum and the Menil Collection.
Pesenti is co-curating the 2018 exhibition “Stones to Stains: Drawings by Victor Hugo” for the Hammer with Cynthia Burlingham, director of the Grunwald Center and deputy director of curatorial affairs at the Hammer.