Exhibitions

Inspired by the life and legacy of jazz musician, devotional leader, and mother Alice Coltrane, this exhibition presents works by contemporary American artists paired with ephemera from Coltrane’s personal archive.

Group exhibition exploring contemporary artists’ use of unusual mark-making devices, including blood, smoke, Kool-Aid, coffee, scrap metal, vegetable juice, pins, dryer lint, and more, to create drawings and prints.

Including many recent acquisitions and demonstrating the Hammer’s commitment to collecting diverse work by local and international artists, this exhibition highlights artworks that use the local, personal, and banal to tap into the universal.

In three sculptures from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, three artists of the same generation emphasize the experience of perception, privilege the spectator’s interpretation, and insist that meaning remain open-ended.

Lap-See Lam’s immersive video installation Tales of the Altersea is inspired by the ruins of a dragon-shaped ship that Lam could see from her studio window in art school. The ruins of this historic vessel serve as a jumping-off point for Lam’s dreamlike story of loss, memory, and resilience.

As part of a 2011 political uprising by the Purépecha community of Cherán, in Michoacán, Mexico, Colectivo Cherani has pioneered a cultural movement that seeks to recover and invigorate the plurality of cultural expressions of the Purépecha people.