Where are They Now? Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Ike Ya

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s first exhibitions in Los Angeles were organized by former Hammer assistant curator Jamillah James in 2015. Crosby’s current exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati includes Ike Ya (2016), which is part of the Hammer’s permanent collection.

Episode 7: Connecting the Dots: Karl With to Alfred Flechtheim to Berlin

Among Fred Grunwald’s many acquaintances in the Los Angeles arts community during the 1950s was the art historian Karl With. In 1933, the Nazis had forced With out of his position as director of the applied arts museum in Cologne, and by 1950 he had begun teaching at UCLA.

Episode 6: The Claims Conference

In 1952 the Claims Conference was organized in New York City by representatives of Jewish organizations from across the world. Their goal was to help advocate for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution by fighting for indemnification. The primary compensation program for individuals was set up in the 1950s by a number of German federal compensation laws known as the Bundesentschädigungsgesetz.

Episode 5: Ebria Feinblatt Correspondence

Ebria Feinblatt was born in Los Angeles and attended the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. After her undergraduate studies, she returned to her hometown to do postgraduate work at UCLA. At that time LACMA was part of an older museum in Exposition park dedicated to history, science, and art. In 1947 Ebria founded the department of prints and drawings, and helped oversee the acquisition of 25,000 prints during the course of her thirty-eight year career.

Episode 4: The NARA Labyrinth

For those of you who aren’t in the know: NARA stands for National Archives and Record Administration, the arm of the United States Government charged with holding (nearly all) government records. Imagine the magnitude of such an enterprise. Now envision trying to find documents about an unassuming German national who fled Europe in the wake of war.

Episode 3: A Tale of Two Families: the Grunwalds and the Wistinetzkis

As Fred Grunwald’s son Ernest tells the story, his father was fortunate to have Hermann Wistinetzki as a brother-in-law. Hermann, who was many years older than Fred, had married Fred’s sister Irma before the First World War.

Episode 2: Setting Sail: The Grunewalds (now the Grunwalds) Come to America

When our research team first met in the summer of 2015, it became apparent that, while we knew many details about Fred Grunwald’s life in Los Angeles, our understanding of his first forty years in Germany was quite sketchy.

Episode 1: Who was Fred Grunwald?

In July 2017, the Hammer will launch its digital archive Loss and Restitution: The Story of the Grunwald Family Collection. In this series, project researchers Kirk Nickel and Maia Woolner will share how they recreated Grunwald's story through archival research, from his early collecting days in Germany to the seizure of his collection by the Gestapo to his emigration to the United States and rebuilding his collection.

Where are They Now? The Drawings of Raymond Pettibon

The four drawings in the Hammer’s permanent collection were lent to the Pettibon retrospective, A Pen of All Work, which traveled from the New Museum to the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht where it will be on view until October 29, 2017.

Building Our Corita Kent Digital Archive

Earlier this month, the Hammer launched its third digital archive, Corita Kent in the Grunwald Center Collection. Like the past digital archives—Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 and Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology—the Corita Kent site features images of artworks, scholarly essays, and a variety of resources for visitors to explore. Unlike its predecessors, however, it is not based on a Hammer exhibition, but rather a facet of the Grunwald Center Collection that has not been widely seen.