Now on View: Nailed It! A History of Hammers

Excavating the multifarious history of mankind's oldest tool, Nailed It!  brings together artifacts, ephemera, and the tool itself in a new installation at the Hammer Museum. This relatively simple blunt object has evolved from its primitive incarnation in bone and stone, to an ever cascading list of exotic and common materials such as wood, iron, steel and high-tech composites. As a tool its scale ranges from a compact hand held device, to gargantuan mechanized contraption. In symbolic form it has signified labor for seemingly contradictory forces, the machine-age communist state, and capitalist domestic goods. The hammer is an indispensable object that occupies a complex duality of construction and destruction, in both physical reality and symbolic form. 

Curated by Stanley Kirk Burrell in collaboration with the Hammer Museum.