Hammer Blog

Nine Lives artist Lisa Anne Auerbach shares her reflections on Los Angeles, art-making and commuting by bicycle in this weekly blog.


OPENING NIGHT AT THE HAMMER
Saturday, March 7, 2009

Nine Lives opened this weekend and there were tons of people at the opening. Thanks to everyone who schlepped out to Westwood Saturday night. Midway through the evening someone said it was SO crowded that they had to park all the way down on P6! That's pretty deep. Here are a few pix from the opening. I was eating mini-cupcakes and drinking beer all evening, except when I was in the gallery, where food and drink is banned.

I wore a No on 8/Octomom sweater in black and white with red trim. Chic!

Hundreds of people wove their way through my sweaters and skirts, which were hanging from the ceiling on mannequin torsos built to look like my body

Nine Lives artist Lisa Anne Auerbach shares her reflections on Los Angeles, art-making and commuting by bicycle in this weekly blog.


BIKING TO THE HAMMER
Friday, March 6, 2009


I rode over to the Hammer this morning for the press preview of Nine Lives. The concept of having nine lives is never more important than when navigating the mean streets of Los Angeles on a bicycle. I live in Jefferson Park. It's a bit of a schlep to the museum from home, maybe 10 miles, maybe 12. Who knows. I don't have an odometer and mileage doesn't matter so much when you're on a bike. It's more about time. I left around a quarter to nine and got to the museum an hour and a bit later. If you just keep going, doesn't matter how slowly, eventually you'll get where you're going.

Rode Pico most of the way, and

The most important holiday season in China is the Chinese New Year and Spring Festival. Over 200,000,000 people travel to their ancestry home to be with their families for a long holiday. Schools are dismissed for a month or two. This holiday is based on the lunar calendar and the date changes every year. It falls early this year on January 25th, 2009, the year of the Ox.

Both have curatorial and scholarly expertise in international contemporary art and a keen interest in the art and artists of Southern California
LOS ANGELES, CA – Ann Philbin, Director of the Hammer Museum, has announced the appointment of two new curators, effective spring 2009, filling key vacancies in the Hammer’s curatorial team. Douglas Fogle has been appointed Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the Hammer. Currently the curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Fogle replaces Gary Garrels, who departed the Hammer in the fall for a position at SFMoMA. Anne Ellegood, currently curator of contemporary art at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., has been appointed Senior Curator. Both curators bring a depth of scholarship and breadth of curatorial experience making them a good match for the Hammer which presents a range of exhibitions from

The Hammer Museum presents its next invitational exhibition celebrating Los Angeles-based artists
On view at the Hammer March 8 - May 31, 2009
Los Angeles, CA - Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A. is the fifth in the Hammer Museum’s
biannual invitational exhibition series highlighting work created in greater Los Angeles. Nine
Lives features over 125 works, much of it new, by nine artists spanning four generations —
Lisa Anne Auerbach, Julie Becker, Llyn Foulkes, Charles Irvin, Hirsch Perlman, Victoria
Reynolds, Kaari Upson, Jeffrey Vallance, and Charlie White. The works include video,
paintings, drawings, photography, textiles, and two new sculptural installations. As all of the
artists live and work in L.A., Nine Lives embodies many of the psychic complexities and
paradoxes of the city – it is at once beautiful and frightening, refined and unruly.

The reinvention of oneself is central to several of these nine artists’ practices