Johanna Burton is the new director of Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art

Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art has reeled in a big fish: Johanna Burton, currently director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, has been named the new director of the ICA.

The curator, historian, and critic is slated to take over Nov. 1.

Burton said that she had attended many ICA shows over the years, and that it was “a place I watched very closely as I was setting my own priorities and working methodologies.” Even though the museum is smaller than the one she currently heads, she called the size “a sweet spot,” with the larger resources of Penn behind it.

“The lasting impact that a place that size can have is certainly equal to the impact of a large institution if done right,” Burton said.

She succeeds Zoë Ryan, who was director from 2020 to 2024. ICA chief curator Hallie Ringle has served as interim director and will continue in that role until Burton begins.

Timothy Rommen, Penn’s vice provost for the arts, said that “from the beginning it was pretty much clear that Johanna had the mix of experience and approach and vision that we were looking for. She’s got over 15 years’ experience at different kinds of institutions, but, important for us, many of those years were at institutions connected to academic units.”

She had been director of the Wexner Center for the Arts, the contemporary arts center at Ohio State University, and also director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Finding the right balance of which constituency the ICA serves — Philadelphians, Penn students and faculty, art cognoscenti? — will be an aspect of her work, Rommen said.

“It’s a part of Penn, it lives in Philadelphia, but its reach is much broader than that,” he said. “One could argue that it has more impact in New York than Philly. That is something that for a couple of directors now we’ve been thinking about and working toward recalibrating.”

Burton, 53, was born in Menomonee Falls, Wis., raised near Reno, Nev., and earned an undergraduate degree in art history from the University of Nevada, Reno. Among her academic credentials are a master’s degree in art history from Princeton University, a master’s from New York University in performance studies, and a master’s in art history, criticism, and theory from the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

She said that fundraising would be one of her main charges, and perhaps bringing to the ICA’s building at 36th and Sansom Streets “more of a social element, a place where people can hang out,” but added that she didn’t want to come in with preordained ideas about the future of the institution or what it needed.

“On my mind is meeting with the staff to learn where things are and have been,” she said, and to ”understand what the staff is wanting to do and what they are feeling.”

One of Burton’s last pieces of business before stepping down from the directorship of the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles after four years will be the October opening of “MONUMENTS,” a long-planned show co-organized and co-presented by MOCA and visual arts space, the Brick. The exhibition juxtaposes decommissioned Confederate statues with work by contemporary artists Kara Walker, Davóne Tines, Martin Puryear, Andres Serrano, and others.

The decommissioned monuments in it “illustrate the evolution of the Confederate monument from its roots in a funerary impulse to its rise as a crystalline symbol of a white supremacist ideology, whose obstinacy became increasingly conspicuous against calls for civil rights,” reads an exhibition description.

“It’s the kind of work that shows how important art is,” Burton said.