Hammer Blog

HOLLYWOOD / WILSHIRE FOCUS
November 12-13
Join in two days of extraordinary exhibitions and free events exploring the history of California design, art, and politics. Admission to the Hammer is FREE on Saturday, November 12 and Sunday, November 13!

Saturday, November 12
The Legacy of the California Design Exhibitions: Creating a Forum for Craft and Design
Craft in America and LACMA collaborate to present a day of panel discussions and film screenings in conjunction with the exhibitions California Design, 1930–1965: Living in a Modern Way at LACMA and Golden State of Craft: California 1960–1985 at CAFAM.

10am – 12pm | LACMA’s Bing Theater
5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, 90036 | www.lacma.org
Morning Panel Discussion: Curating California Design with panelists Eudorah M. Moore, Bernard Kester, Richard Amend, and Lois Boardman.

12pm | A+D Museum
6032 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles 90036 | www.aplusd.org
Swiss on Rye Brown

Over the past few weeks, the Hammer Museum has had the privilege of hosting over 500 high school students as part of the Now Dig This! outreach program. The exhibition has been particularly interesting to the students because most were not only unfamiliar with the black artists from the time period, but many were also unaware of Los Angeles history as a whole.


Our first group visited us from the ICEF Public School cohort. Students from Frederick Douglass Academy High School, Lou Dantzler Preparatory High School, and View Park Preparatory Accelerated High School joined us for a morning of touring, browsing the collections, and eating lunch together.


Students from Lou Dantzler High School were accompanied by their art teacher and were already well-versed in art techniques and terminology. They spent time in the Permanent Collection talking about perspective and viewing some of their favorite artists. Many of the students said

FREE SUNDAYS
November 6, 2011 - January 8, 2012

The Hammer is offering free museum admission for all exhibitions every Sunday until the closing of the exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 on Sunday, January 8, 2012.

Admission is ALWAYS FREE for Museum members, students with ID, UCLA faculty and staff, military personnel, veterans, and visitors 17 and under accompanied by an adult. Free on Thursdays for all visitors.

For hours, location, and parking information, click here.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF A BOOK: CATALOGUING AND SHELVING

Once a book enters our library several things happen, chief of which is cataloguing. We’re always asked about the yellow-dotted books that preponderate on our shelves. From a certain library perspective, they are books-in-waiting -- books yet to be entered in LibraryThing.com, the ready-to-wear online catalogue that we make suit the hybrid needs of a lending library that’s also a bookshop. Library Thing can record the presence of a book in our system, and with some labor let us track its whereabouts.

All this doesn’t happen automatically. Like all of Libros Schmibros’ systems, it is hand-entered and labor-intensive. Chief among our cataloguers is Denise Villegas, below, UCLA Information Science graduate student and Libros family member extraordinaire. You’ve seen her at the Hammer, with her dainty fingers entering data almost as fast as we can read it.



Glad was the

Much like natural selection, Libros Schmibros takes the generously bestowed book bounty of the city and chooses titles that best fit our holdings. It’s important that the right books come to us, and that they combine with our library in ways that make sense. Books we can’t use are re-donated, though that means finding time and labor to haul them off to the library, or some other repository. Honestly, we appreciate the gesture, but we’d really rather not get the likes of Readers Digest Condensed Books or back issues of National Geographic at all.








That said, we dig your books and want more of them. New books get yellow stickers so that we know they’ve not yet been cataloged in our database. Patrons have asked what these yellow dots mean, and if these are the ones that are available for checkout. Truth is, all books are up for grabs