Hammer Blog

In conjunction with the current exhibition A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living on view through September 8, 2013
Thursday, July 18, 2013 | Gallery 4
USC Class of ’52 Reunion to Honor Former Professor A. Quincy Jones
1952. The year Singin’ In The Rain was released, Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes were introduced in grocery stores, and the Big Bang Theory of the universe was first proposed. This was also the year Frank Mosher, J. V. Ouzounian, Don Park, and Robert Tyler took a fifth-year design class at the University of Southern California (USC) taught by none other than A. Quincy Jones. More than a half of a century after their graduation, the four architects had a class reunion on July 18 in Hammer Gallery 4 and shared their experiences with museum staff and visitors—the A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living exhibition quite appropriately serving as the backdrop to the Flash

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.

As all things in China rapidly change so does the air quality. If it doesn’t happen naturally, the government will see to it. In 2008, China seeded the air to produce rain in Beijing to clear the air for the Olympics. I was walking down the street one day with a friend and it started to rain, but it was not like a real rain, it fell in a strange misty drizzle. My friend said, “Do you know that this is not real rain, it is produced by the government.” But it cleaned things up a bit for sure. Now, can they and Washington clean the other things up also?
In the photos you can see amazing blue skies from the Beijing airport to the Forbidden City to the Great Wall… Good (H)air day! -James Elaine

Every year, the Hammer Museum offers a unique opportunity for UCLA graduate students to curate an exhibition from the Grunwald Collection of Graphic Arts housed in the Grunwald Study Center. This year, history of science doctoral candidates Marissa Petrou and Twyla Ruby collaborated in organizing a compelling exhibition highlighting the entwined histories of science and art. Skeletons and Silicon: The Art and Science of The Human Bodywill be on view in the Grunwald Study Center through August 2013. Below is their exhibition essay.


A skeletal figure dances gracefully across a celestial field in Nancy Sutor's photomontage Skeleton (1982). Here, the scientific icon has been reimagined and imbued with vitality. In Barbara Morgan's Inner and Outer Man (1972) a luminous x-ray of a skull and spine is superimposed against the dark silhouette of a man's head. In this dual portrait of her recently deceased husband, the two representations comprise a palimpsest

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.