David Hammons

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Born: 1943

Summary of David Hammons

David Hammons aims to openly criticise the nature of the art industry and its ridiculous elitism by avoiding conventional forms of artistic production, distribution and exhibition. Although he is an important and much sought after artist, he has refused to follow “the rules” throughout his career – denying interviews and exhibition requests, and selling the work personally instead of a gallery. In part because of his interests in Dadaism and Marcel Duchamp, this iconoclastic attitude has enabled Hammons to produce work in many media that is as powerful as it is provocative. Hammons is most recognised for his work using non-traditional materials and abandoned items that allude to and remark on the urban experience in Africa. Hammons often refers in his work to the legacy of racism and the harmful stereotypes that have been placed on the African American culture and tries to demystify and recover the objects and language that led to these narratives. In this way, he permeates these “symbols” with a new and transformational force.

Hammons stated that “outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol,” and he constantly dealt with symbols and their complicated and diverse meanings. Political contents are sometimes linked to racism and long-standing cultural stereotypes about African-Americo, such as American Flags, his usage of spades, empty liquor bottles, caps, hair, bones and basketball hoops.

Hammons is deeply concerned with neighbourhoods and communities, and a large part of his work attempts to address the social, political and cultural characteristics of these places by removing art from studios, museums or galleries and returning it to the road in a more democratic manner. As he put it, “I prefer to perform better on the street, since art is simply one of the things in your daily life. It’s what you’re moving through, and there’s no seniority.”

Although Hammons said he never loved art, his work shows a profound knowledge of art history and the art world’s mechanics. His attention is focused on the history of art and its institutions and his biases and predilection for white artists and white beauty ideals. But it’s not only about racial problems. His work also deals with class problems that attempt to clarify the ongoing economic inequalities in an elite art industry.

Hammons’ work is essentially about exposure. Whether it is to discuss what or who is seen, or who is not seen, by covering it, making it ephemeral or physically blocking our way to that (racism, bodies, communities, language) or hindering our visibility or accessing his work, Hammons questions whether we can know anything by just looking at it.

Biography of David Hammons

Childhood

David Hammons was born into a single mother in Springfield, Illinois in 1943. Hammon has always been reluctant to discuss his early life and background, fiercely secretive and hesitant to let his history to include his art. He did, however, mention the difficulties experienced by him and his family in the 1940s. Like many African-American families, the Hammons family struggled to make ends meet throughout the war. Hammons’ mother found living at the height of the Second World War much more difficult. As Hammons would remark, “I still don’t know how we got by.” As a small kid in the late 1940s, Hammons was a direct witness to the injustices faced by Africa’s segregated Americans, acquiring an acute awareness of social and racial inequalities.

At school, Hammons was not academically inclined to pursue vocational classes. He exhibited an early artistic aptitude but found it “so easy” that he had acquired a “disdain for them.” He seemed disinterested in the canon of art history he learnt about at school. Hammons stated that he doesn’t enjoy art, but he claims as an affliction: “I was born into it.”

Early LIfe

In 1962, Hammons left Illinois in Los Angeles at the age of 19. He attended Los Angeles City College for a year, then proceeded to Los Angeles Trade Technical College to study advertising. In 1966 he attended the Choinard Art Institute (later CalArts), where he graduated in 1968. Between 1968 to 1972, he studied at the Otis Art Institute during night courses. He married Rebecca Williams in 1966 (the couple divorced in 1972).

At Otis, he trained in the WPA (Works Progress Management) in the 1930s under Charles White, the African American artist, printer and muralist. White had a major early impact on Hammons, in particular his conviction that art could be a kind of activism and a tool for social change. White’s presence at Otis, at the height of Black Power and Blak Cultural Nationalism, and after the Watts Rebellions and the murder of Malcolm X in 1965, coincided with the development of the overwhelmingly political movement for the Black Arts. The Movement of Black Art promoted “black aesthetic,” the production of art for community-building and fostering, and new and more democratic methods of working. The Watts uprising was a turning moment for Hammons and other black artists in the 1960s in Los Angeles. As Kellie Jones has observed, “it changed people’s expectations and the way they looked at the world; changed artists’ approach to their craft, and their materials, and led them to question what art might be and do.”

Hammons met Noah Purifoy, John T. Riddle, Jr., and John Outterbridge at that period, all of which gave authority to other Black artists and created work consistent with the Black Arts movement. The first director of the Watts Towers Arts Center was Purifoy who studied at the Choinard Art Institute. He worked with collage and assembly, frequently using trash and other abandoned items in his area. Hammons was especially concerned with this egalitarian approach to materials and influenced his subsequent work. Riddle relocated subsequently to Atlanta, and presented his first solo exhibition to Hammons.

In LA in the late 1960s, Hammons met Senga Nengudi, a conceptual artist and performer with whom he shared a studio afterwards. It was part of a group that regularly met at Suzanne Jackson’s Gallery 32, including Betye Saar, Outterbridge and others. Around Otis and Choinard, the gallery fostered the work of young African-American painters. Hammons exhibited his first “body prints,” at Gallery 32 by covering himself with grease and impressing his body on paper and then covering his impression with colour.

In the early 1970s, Hammons founded Studio Z (also known as LA Rebellion), an art collective which convened in its studio in the antique dance hall of Slauson Avenue in Los Angeles, along with Nengudi, Barbara McCollough, Emory Douglas, Charles White and Maren Hassinger. Despite the name of the group, their collaborative work frequently took place outside the studio in the form of spontaneous performances and interactive activities, some of which were merged with Hammons, a jazz musician. Jazz performers who had established their own success zone were seen as a model for artists such as Hammons, Nengudi and others.

Mid Life

In the early 70s, Hammons started spending more time in New York City in an effort to grow his practise, where he stayed with Nengudi several times before moving back to Los Angeles. In 1974 He permanently relocated to New York City, settled in Harlem, a mainly African-American district with a history that goes back to the Harlem Renaissance as a centre of innovation. Hammons was well aware of the heritage of the Harlem Renaissance movement via his work with Charles White and wanted to participate actively in his work through the African-American experience. As he remarked of Harlem once, “You show your visa as you reach 110th Street. You enter a time zone, you follow traces of legends – Parker, Coltrane, Robeson, Malcolm. The temperature is warmer.” He travelled to Los Angeles, where he maintained his connections to Studio Z.

In New York, he belonged to a group of African-American artists associated with the pioneering Just Above Midtown (JAM) art gallery on West 57th Street, regarded Gallery 32 in Los Angeles as comparable to east coast. The JAM (1974-1986) was established by Linda Goode Bryant to exhibit the work of modern black artists and colour painters such as Howardena Pindell, Lorraine O’Grady, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Dawoud Bey, Randy Williams, Nengudi and Butch Morris. JAM was created against the bias of white art, where art was debated and critiqued and artists could explore freely. At that time New York was still very much a city of painters and if you weren’t a painter it was tough to take seriously. Not unexpectedly, it was contentious Hammons’ debut show at JAM. Many artists who viewed the exhibition were not persuaded by Hammons’ unusual “non-art” materials. The group who had met for the opening hours at the JAM show discussed whether or not disposed items could be termed “art” and concluded, as Goode Byant remarked, “well, why not?”

As his work became more public and interactive, and he started working with large-scale installations and events outside of his studio, his buddy Dawoud Bey began photographing Hammons’ work on Harlem streets. Bey went on hand to document Hammons selling onto the street (next to other street vendors), Bliz-aard Sale (1983) in front of Cooper Union, Pissed Off (1981) culminating in the re-settlement of Hammons urinating in a vacant lot of Harlem on Richard Serra’s sculpture T.W.U. (1979) outside Franklin Street Subway Station and High Goals.

Late Life and Contemporary Work

In the 2000s, Hammons visited and displayed more often, including visits to Japan (2002), Africa (2004) and Egypt (2008). If his earlier work has reacted to communities and surroundings, the work he has done on site in recent years has become ephemeral. For example, his 2001 Black and Blue concerto forced spectators to traverse a vast, empty gallery in the dark with only a bleak flashlight.

Hammons lives and works in New York City and has relocated to Brooklyn from Harlem. Hammons is still actively working and participating in exhibits in his sixties. In 2007, he worked with his wife, artist Chie Hasegawa Hammons, on a show at the Upper East Side Gallerie (L&M Arts) and recently bought a warehouse property in Yonkers, nearby New York City, where he intends to establish his own gallery. As an artist who exhibits seldom, he disdains the trappings of the world of art and has long been trying to control his work. In 2020, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Hudson River Park Trust are also collaborating on a public art piece called Day’s End (which Hammons calls a “ghost monument”).

Well recognised in New York in the 1970s and 1980’s, Hammons’ work was presented in 1990 at PS1 in New York. He was given a MacArthur Genius Grant the same year. The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco gathered together a group of artists, curators, and art historians to directly evaluate Hammons’ heritage and to debate his work.

Finally, to be an artist for Hammons is to make his life his art. Like the Dadaists before him, he stays a cultural outsider deliberately. Hammons continues to challenge a black artist and instead embodies something far more complicated and difficult to pin-down as his work refers to racial problems. “Hammons’s work plays with art the way a jazz musician plays with sound – he gets inside it, bends it, twists it around and keeps it from sitting too still or getting too comfortable.” Huberman remarked. For a new generation of American artists such as Kara Walker, Dawoud Bey, Lorna Simpson and Kehinde Wiley, his capacity to make tough tales come to light, referring to the legacy of racism and race stereotypes.

Famous Art by David Hammons

Pray for America

1969

Pray For America is one of the early “body prints” made by Hammons when he lived in Los Angeles. Performative in nature to produce the prints, Hammons then rolls about his linen and imprints his face and torso, coating himself with fatty or margarine frying. He sprinkled colour over the grate to show a fantastic outline on a simple white surface. These x-ray pictures were then contrasted with politically charged symbols, like the American flag, which after fixing the photos of the body, were silkscreened on the canvas or paper. Hammons explored for his body prints with the use of odd or “poor” materials, which work with artists associated with Arte Povera in a similar spirit. Neodada also reminds of the performative aspect of body prints and everyday materials, in particular Yves Klein’s Anthropometries or Robert Rauschenberg’s large-scale cameral photographs taken in conjunction with his former wife Susan Weil, but Hammons’ prints reflect the increase of corperal art in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early 1960s as a result of their body usage.

How Ya Like Me Now

1988

The first 20-foot-high tin billboard painting of David Hammons was created in 1988, appearing in a corner of Washington, DC, opposite the National Portrait Gallery. The artwork depicts Reverend Jesse Jackson, a leader of African civil rights with white complexion, blond hair and blue eyes. The lyrics, taken from a song by famous 80s rap musician Kool Moe Dee, “How Ya Like Me Now.” were scratched across the bottom, in graffiti-like writing. A group of young black labourers assaulted the billboard with sled hammers shortly after the artwork was placed, and without any title or other indication that it was a piece of art, partly damaging it. The artwork was eventually brought back to Hammons, who re-created the piece and placed it in the wall of the gallery immediately in front of it with a row of sledgehammers. The vandalism that caused the piece to be unveiled eventually became a part of it. As David Hammons stated afterwards about vandalism: “Whenever you put something outside you have to be prepared.”

African American Flag

1990

African American Flag, one of David Hammons’ most significant works, was made in 1990 for a black USA exhibition in Amsterdam. The group exhibition, organised by Christiaan Bruan, sought to give attention to the under-represented African-American artists in Europe. African American Flag was the focus of the show, with the colours of black freedom, and was flown in the Museumplein courtyard around Overholland Museum.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver

David Hammons aims to openly criticise the nature of the art industry and its ridiculous elitism by avoiding conventional forms of artistic production, distribution and exhibition.
Although he is an important and much sought after artist, he has refused to follow “the rules” throughout his career – denying interviews and exhibition requests, and selling the work personally instead of a gallery.
In part because of his interests in Dadaism and Marcel Duchamp, this iconoclastic attitude has enabled Hammons to produce work in many media that is as powerful as it is provocative.

Hammons is most recognised for his work using non-traditional materials and abandoned items that allude to and remark on the urban experience in Africa.
Hammons often refers in his work to the legacy of racism and the harmful stereotypes that have been placed on the African American culture and tries to demystify and recover the objects and language that led to these narratives.
In this way, he permeates these “symbols” with a new and transformational force.Hammons stated that “outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol,” and he constantly dealt with symbols and their complicated and diverse meanings.

Political contents are sometimes linked to racism and long-standing cultural stereotypes about African-Americo, such as American Flags, his usage of spades, empty liquor bottles, caps, hair, bones and basketball hoops.
Hammons is deeply concerned with neighbourhoods and communities, and a large part of his work attempts to address the social, political and cultural characteristics of these places by removing art from studios, museums or galleries and returning it to the road in a more democratic manner.
As he put it, “I prefer to perform better on the street, since art is simply one of the things in your daily life.

It’s what you’re moving through, and there’s no seniority.”Although Hammons said he never loved art, his work shows a profound knowledge of art history and the art world’s mechanics.
His attention is focused on the history of art and its institutions and his biases and predilection for white artists and white beauty ideals.
But it’s not only about racial problems.

His work also deals with class problems that attempt to clarify the ongoing economic inequalities in an elite art industry.Hammons’ work is essentially about exposure.
Whether it is to discuss what or who is seen, or who is not seen, by covering it, making it ephemeral or physically blocking our way to that (racism, bodies, communities, language) or hindering our visibility or accessing his work, Hammons questions whether we can know anything by just looking at it.