Hammer Blog

Lunchtime Art Talk: Dream Home Resource Center
With Allison Agsten
Dream Home Resource Center, Olga Koumoundouros’ most recent installation, has put a bump in the proverbial road of museums across the city paying homage to Pacific Standard Time’s recognition and celebration of residential architecture in Los Angeles. But it is a bump that the Hammer Museum is more than proud to host since Dream Home Resource Center has come to serve as the raw, not-so-glamorous addition to the otherwise sleek and glassy buildings a part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.
Despite its welcoming vibe, donning rainbow doors and furniture painted gold, Dream Home Resource Center doesn’t scream sunshine and good times so much as it reveals the seedy underbelly of housing in Los Angeles. It boasts a timeline that wraps around its walls with facts and significant events including the notorious housing crisis. The

There has been a lot of international attention drawn to the air quality of China and of Beijing recently. At times the air here has been horrific, but other times crystal and serene, granted that is rare. I live here, see it, and breathe it everyday. I will post several photo blogs on the air and environment conditions seen through the eyes of an artist, not a newscaster. It will try to illustrate what is real and what is purported or perceived to be real. When the air here is so thick that I cannot see the buildings across the street, I call it a “Monet Day.” That is what we should all be able to do, make the best of our world and lives in transition.



I can hardly make out the name of Air China (airlines) on the planes at the Beijing International Airport as I

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.

2013 Spring Festival/Chinese New Year of the Snake
Every year since 2008, when I moved to China, during the Chinese New Year I travel to different locations to visit friend’s hometowns. Usually my friend’s homes are in very remote rural areas where I am the first foreigner to set foot in their village or home. This year, Lin Lei, a friend who has been my part time assistant invited me to go with him and two other friends to his home in Long Hua, Hebei Province, north east of Beijing. He warned me it was going to be cold, and it was! -18c at times. I didn’t have a seat on the train from Beijing, but it was not too bad, only an 8 hour or so trip. I know people who travel 24 + hours during the Spring Festival with no seat or bed on trains so crowded

Hammer Conversations | John Baldessari + Ed Ruscha on Richard Artschwager
Moderated by Bob Monk
Sunday, June 23, 2013
A serpentine line of eager art enthusiasts lined the museum’s courtyard for June 23rd’s Hammer Conversation. On this balmy Sunday afternoon, fans of the revered Los Angeles-based artists John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha arrived in hordes to see the two in conversation about their fellow friend and artist, the late Richard Artschwager. The talk was to be moderated by Bob Monk, director of Gagosian Gallery’s Uptown Gallery, New York, and judging by the chattering crowd clad in cheery summer attire and dispositions to match—this was going to be good.

The Billy Wilder Theater lights dimmed and were replaced by the luminaries who took the stage after a warm introduction given by the Hammer’s director of public programs, Claudia Bestor. It wasn’t long before we learned just how enamored Monk, Baldessari