David Hammons

Hammons' body prints, flags and found-object sculptures come together in this artist's book documenting his thought-provoking conceptual exhibition This post-exhibition catalog revisits David Hammons’ 2019 show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. A singular book created entirely under the artist’s direction, this publication illustrates the most expansive exhibition of this legendary artist’s work to date. Said critic Jonathan Griffin of the original exhibition, "Alongside finished artworks, including framed examples of Hammons’s sublime drawings made with bounced basketballs and powdered Kool-Aid, there are plenty of apparently ad hoc, readymade interventions, installations in which it is unclear where one ends and the next begins. … Hammons, it seems, wants his viewers to relax, historiography be damned." Born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois, David Hammons moved to Los Angeles in 1963 at the age of 20 and began making his body prints several years later. He studied at Otis Art Institute with Charles White and became part of a younger generation of Black avant-garde artists loosely associated with the Black Arts Movement. In Los Angeles, Hammons was a cofounder of Studio Z, a group which included Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Joe Ray and others. Hammons has lived in New York since 1978.