Hammer Blog

Lunchtime Art Talk: Käthe Kollwitz's Los bruch (Outbreak), 1902
with Leslie Cozzi



Hammer Curatorial Associate, Leslie Cozzi, discussed artist Käthe Kollwitz’s, Outbreak (1902) in the Vault Gallery on July 31. Kollwitz grew up in Germany in a well-to-do family who truly valued the arts. Her parents, who were intellectual leftists, enriched their children’s lives with everything from literature to music. They feared philistinism and made it their mission to steer clear of a bourgeois existence. “In fact,” Leslie told us, “she got married at seventeen and her parents were scandalized because she’d done something so conventional.”
While Kollwitz may have married early in a very bourgeois fashion, she was anything but. She wrote extensively in her diary about realism and wanting to make work that was relatable. Kollwitz was very much concerned with the plight of the proletariat and focused on suffering and the resistance to suffering in

Jeanne Baron | New York City Real Estate Agent
Jeanne is an agent with the largest brokerage in New York City.
She specializes in West Central Brooklyn, where the real estate market is at a boil. In established luxury neighborhoods or places where gentrification is on fire, inventory is low, bidding wars are the norm, all cash buyers are distorting the market, and open houses are packed like sardines.
The laws and practices governing each real estate transaction provide a loose structure for a wild-west atmosphere among investors, brokers, buyers, and sellers. Common practices vary, highly subjective pressures shape the outcome of each deal. Buyers and Sellers who don’t make their living in real estate find themselves guessing how to navigate the world of middlemen associated with a sale of a property. Agents, lawyers, appraisers, lenders, inspectors, title companies, and insurance providers enter the process and leave their mark

Bai Ye | Cheng Qianning | 2013 June
Telescope presents two artists from Xi’An in their first Beijing exhibitions.
“…who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” is from a verse in the Bible referring to a place or a state of being that is beyond the abilities and senses of humankind to enter or perceive, but it exists and bekons nonetheless.
Light is essential in the work of Bai Ye and Cheng Qianning. One works with light from within to reveal what is hidden in darkness hoping to find a way out into the day, the other works with light from without surveying from unseen vantage points the lives and remnants of cities and people below. One is intimate, the other is objective, but both reveal vulnerable states of man.


Bai Ye’s photos are made with his mobile phone and a flashlight in abandoned

Dream Home Resource Center, Olga Koumoundouros’s most recent investigation into the realm of home ownership, addresses the immateriality of real estate transactions and the shift from home as emblem of the American dream to house as commodity. Inspired in part by the Hammer Museum’s exhibition A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living and Jones’s vision of modern architecture, Koumoundouros fast-forwards more than half a century to the present, a moment filled with far less optimism about housing in the United States.

Dream Home Resource Center, Olga Koumoundouros’s most recent investigation into the realm of home ownership, addresses the immateriality of real estate transactions and the shift from home as emblem of the American dream to house as commodity. Inspired in part by the Hammer Museum’s exhibition A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living and Jones’s vision of modern architecture, Koumoundouros fast-forwards more than half a century to the present, a moment filled with far less optimism about housing in the United States.