Hammer Blog

Exploring Architecture: Family Day at the Hammer on September 8, 2013 was the third annual Family Day, a large event of art-making, music and fun based on one of the Hammer’s special exhibitions. This year’s Family Day was themed on architecture, and coincided with the last day of the A. Quincy Jones exhibition. The goals of Family Day are to bring creative, exhibition-based and hands-on educational activities to a diverse and multi-generational audience. This year’s Family Day was supersized; we had more artists and more projects than we have ever had before, and were able to explore architectural questions in depth.


The activities were so successful in a way because they were so simple yet so focused. Each architect and artist came up with a question to explore in their activity that related to architectural thinking about space, light, scale and material, from “What is a home?” to

LOS ANGELES—The Hammer Museum has announced that it will eliminate its admission fee and become entirely FREE to the public in 2014. Free admission will coincide with the opening of the Hammer’s 2014 exhibition season in early February. Hammer director Ann Philbin shared the exciting news at the Museum’s annual Gala in the Garden fundraiser on Saturday, October 5.
The Hammer is committed to eliminating admission fees permanently. Free admission for the first four years is made possible by two gifts received over the summer from longtime Hammer Museum benefactors Erika J. Glazer and Brenda R. Potter. Erika Glazer is an art collector who joined the Hammer’s Board of Directors in 2009. She has worked in the real estate business, construction, and as a private investor since 1976.
“It is rare that you have an opportunity to make a gift that simultaneously helps transform an institution and serves the

"My mind is telling me no, but my body, my body is telling me yes!" -R.Kelly
It's a disco tragedy, the battle between body and mind. I'm on the dance floor, swaying to the music, letting the beat move me to and fro, when listening to the words of the song stops me in my tracks. Maybe it's misogynistic lyrics, or a sexist command to dance a certain way, or maybe it's just the sheer banality of another pop song about sexpectations: whatever it is, my mind urges me to take a principled stance and walk away.
And yet…the body won't give up that easily, and thus I become the definition of losing myself to the dance, tossing aside learned ideology to let loose and embrace the rhythm. Should I feel bad for this? I mean, isn't that what the dance floor is all about, letting the

Forrest Bess' work to me has always been about the shaping of color. For my DJ set, I have chosen songs whose titles specifically reference certain colors, and I will layer and juxtapose those songs in ways that evoke specific Bess paintings like The Hermaphrodite, View of Maya, and an Untitled, 1949 greenish piece with a patch of grey and red (1949) that was in the Gober-curated section of the 2012 Whitney Biennial.



[caption id="attachment_3577" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Forrest Bess. The Hermaphrodite, 1957. Oil on canvas. 8 x 11-1/4 inches. The Menil Collection, Houston. Gift of John Wilcox in memory of Frank Owen Wilson. Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston."][/caption]



[caption id="attachment_3578" align="aligncenter" width="449" caption="Forrest Bess. View of Maya, 1951. Oil on canvas. 8 x 8 inches. The Menil Collection, Houston. Bequest of Jermayne MacAgy. Photo: Paul Hester."][/caption]

The music itself will range from classics like Brian Eno's "Another Green World

I always try to have my mobile phone or camera ready when I ride my bicycle through the streets of Beijing, and that's everyday. A bicycle offers the perfect vantage point to be able to capture the amazing images that are all around me. I have made so many photos of various types of vehicles that one blog posting is not enough, so welcome to Beijing Transports ll (and possibly lll).

Beijing is full of migrant workers coming from all over the country’s rural areas. These are the people that make, alter, and operate the majority of these vehicles. Many of their carts are works of art in themselves, but are made for purposes of survival, not for museums. Perhaps these are the people that pulled the rickshaws 100 years ago. I see the beauty of their ingenuity, persistence, and dedication, but also know their lives are not easy