Armand Hammer Museum Of Art And Cultural Center

When Allegra Pesenti, associate curator at the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum, stumbled across scrolls of woodcut prints from the Cuban revolution in a storage room at UCLA, she was mesmerized and moved to delve deeper into the medium of woodcutting. The end result is the upcoming exhibit, "Gouge: The Modern Woodcut 1870 to Now."

In less than 17 years of institutional life, as the Hammer Museum has grown from orphanhood into contemporary art stardom, director Ann Philbin has won a reputation as a remarkably successful turnaround artist. Since her arrival in 1999, the museum has grown into a cutting-edge art space from a vanity institution beset with troubles, beginning with the death of founder Armand Hammer 15 days after its November 1990 opening.

Culled from more than 300 pieces that have been acquired since 2004, "Hammer Contemporary Collection: Part I" (Tuesday through April 8) gathers an assortment of 52 works on paper, mainly drawings and photographs produced by American artists over the last 10 years. The Hammer's chief curator, Gary Garrels, breaks it down: "We'll have a cluster of historical works by primarily New York artists."

A secret six-year imbroglio that threatened to dismantle the Hammer Museum -- established by oil baron Armand Hammer and endowed with art by his foundation -- has ended with the museum and the Armand Hammer Foundation agreeing to part company and divide a $305-million collection amassed by Hammer.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS know that cleaning up a toxic spill can take a very long time. Now, art museum watchers know it too. Nineteen years and one day ago, the late chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp., Armand Hammer, created the cultural equivalent of an oil spill. He turned his back on nearly two decades of pledges to bequeath his mostly modest art collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, announcing a plan to open his own art museum instead.

New York will get the photo show, but Los Angeles will get the photographer: Veteran Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson will discuss his 50-plus years behind the lens in a lecture and slide show Thursday at the UCLA Hammer Museum, including what is perhaps his best-known work: images from the civil rights movement, 1961 to 1965. The 7 p.m. event is in advance of Davidson's exhibition "Time of Change," at Aperture Gallery in New York from May 18 through Aug. 2.

IF you're free this summer, so is the UCLA Hammer Museum. From June 1 through Sept. 2, the Hammer will offer no-charge admission as part of its "Free Summer" program. And on Thursday evenings in July, the museum will also offer free music with the 8- to 10-p.m. event "Also I Like to Rock, the Indie 103.1 New Music Showcase," a collaboration with 103.1-FM featuring "just under the radar" bands. Free Summer also includes the Aug. 23 "Hammer Bash!

Continuing to build its contemporary art holdings despite prohibitive market prices, the UCLA Hammer Museum has been chosen by Colorado developer Larry Marx and his wife, Susan, to inherit their collection of drawings and other works on paper by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and other major figures of the post-World War II era.

The UCLA Hammer Museum, which announced in December that it would operate its 2006 public programs in a temporary off-site venue during construction of its new Billy Wilder Theater, will instead continue to offer all of the programs on-site in its Gallery 6 space. Although construction of the new theater, beginning this month, is expected to take a year, the temporary use of a new Hammer Annex was deemed unnecessary when an alternative site for staging construction was found.

The UCLA Hammer Museum has received an estimated $1-million gift of more than 80 contemporary artworks, significantly expanding its collection of photography and other works on paper. The donation of drawings, prints, videos and mixed-media works, as well as photographs, is from Santa Monica gallery owner Patrick Painter and his wife, Soo Jin Jeong-Painter. It includes large groups of works by Roy Arden, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Williams.