New director announced at Wattis Institute
‘Exciting time’ with CCA expanding campus
California College of the Arts has named Daisy Nam the new director and chief curator of the school’s Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts museum.
The school announced Tuesday, Feb. 27, that Nam will replace Anthony Huberman, who was director from 2013 to February 2023. Huberman left the position to assume the executive director role at the John Giorno Foundation in New York.
Jeanne Gerrity has served as Wattis’ interim director for the past year, and led the national job search. Nam will begin her new role April 1.
“It’s such an exciting time for CCA,” Nam told the Chronicle in an exclusive interview.
She mentioned the private arts school’s $123 million expansion project led by San Francisco architecture firm Studio Gang as a major enticement to accept the position. In addition to adding 90,000 square feet to its campus in the city’s design district, the move will also create a new home for the Wattis exhibition galleries.
Nam will join CCA President David Howse, whose appointment was announced in October. Nam, 40, said that new leadership at CCA and other arts organizations throughout the city made it feel like the perfect time to make the move to San Francisco from San Antonio, where she has worked as director of the contemporary art museum Ballroom Marfa.
“It seems like not only is CCA building a new chapter, but it seems like the art world and community in San Francisco is also having a new moment,” said Nam, who began as a curator at Ballroom Marfa in 2020 before assuming its leadership in 2022.
Nam’s “deep understanding of contemporary art and commitment to artistic innovation align perfectly with the (Wattis) Institute’s mission,” Howse said in a statement. He also noted that
once the campus expansion project is completed in the fall, the Wattis Institute and the school will again be in close proximity. The current Wattis building at 360 Kansas St. is five blocks from the main campus at Eighth Street; Howse believes that its new geographic proximity will allow for “even more opportunities to showcase the stellar programming and exhibitions shepherded by Daisy.”
Among Nam’s most well-known projects was 2023’s group exhibition “Tongues of Fire” at Ballroom Marfa, which included works by Jorge Méndez Blake, Jesse Chun, Adriana Corral, JJJJJerome Ellis and Nakai Flotte exploring themes of suppressing and silencing language. Nam also led the creation of the forthcoming 20th anniversary book celebrating Ballroom Marfa.
Before working at Ballroom Marfa, Nam served as the assistant director at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University from 2015 to 2019.
Nam is a Los Angeles native and said she often visited her sister at UC Berkeley when they were both in college. She said the return to California is a welcome one. Given the Bay Area’s* rich history of artists engaging with technology in their practices, she said it’s important to think about what a contemporary art space can be in San Francisco, especially as definitions of art and new forms of media continue to evolve.
The first show she will program at the Wattis will be a sculpture exhibition with artists Ester Partegàs and Michelle Lopez, both from Brooklyn, with whom she worked at Ballroom Marfa. The exhibition is expected to open in early 2025.
Nam is also developing a show looking at diasporic culture and America’s visa process, specifically the O-1 visa for “individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement.”
Among the most rewarding things about working in a school environment, Nam said, is how young artists and curators continue to expand definitions of what exhibitions can be. “In that sense, I don’t necessarily know exactly what types of exhibitions we’ll have or what they’ll look like,” she explained.
“When you’re developing a series of ideas and have the freedom to find the form for it, that is really exciting, whether it is a form more performative or technologically based.”