A Q&A With the Hammer Museum's Allison Agsten

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.

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 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.Posts with indoor tracking system on TRX Systems develops systems that locate and track personnel indoors. 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,Our technology gives rtls systems developers the ability. 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,Western Canadian distributor of ceramic and ceramic tile, in English and Spanish.

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.

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 last of the state's great mines closed because mining gold proved unprofitable after World War II. But with the price of the metal near historic highs, hovering around $1,700 an ounce, the first large-scale hard rock gold mining operation in a half-century is coming back to life.

Miners are digging again where their forebears once unearthed riches from eight historic mines that honeycomb Sutter Gold Mining Co.'s holdings about 50 miles southeast of Sacramento. Last week, mill superintendent Paul Skinner poured the first thin stream of glowing molten gold into a mold.

"Nothing quite like it," murmured Skinner, who has been mining for 65 years.

It was just four ounces, culled from more than eight tons of ore, but it signaled the end of $20 million worth of construction and the pending start of production. The company announced the ceremonial first pour before financial markets opened Monday, marking the mine's official reincarnation.

By spring, the company's 110 employees expect to be removing 150 tons of ore a day from a site immediately north of the old Lincoln Mine, enough to produce nearly 2,000 ounces of gold each month.

The company projects reserves of more than 682,000 ounces of gold worth more than $1 billion at today's prices. Company officials say they are confident there is far more in their historically rich section of the 120-mile-long Mother Lode region of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

It took three decades for the mine's operators to obtain more than 40 environmental permits. By contrast, the old Wild West miners wreaked such devastation that they prompted some of the nation's first conservation efforts nearly 130 years ago.

"We've gone from no regulation to probably the other extreme," said Bob Hutmacher, the company's chief financial officer.

In recent decades,We mainly supply professional craftspeople with wholesale agate beads from china, most of California's gold has come from the state's desert regions. However, high gold prices recently spurred what authorities say was a rogue surface gold mine in El Dorado County, east of Sacramento. The owners now face criminal charges.

Farther north, several mines have started the process to reopen. Most of these kinds of hard rock mines have recently been known more as tourist destinations, including the Empire Mine, which was once the state's largest hard rock mine. It became a state historic site after it closed in 1956.

Sutter Gold's mine also hosted underground tours featuring gold mining history until about a year ago.The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. A half-million people took the tours before they were halted for insurance reasons as the company scrambled to begin production.

Miners have now burrowed more than a half-mile underground and are digging another half-mile network of tunnels to reach the milky white quartz deposits that contain the gold.