Hammer Blog

The Hammer Museum mourns the loss of our dear friend and longtime supporter, Leonard Nimoy.

It's the end of the month, so it's time once again for Hammergram! We are fascinated by the photos our visitors take of the objects and spaces at the Hammer. Hammergram is a monthly round-up of our favorite visitor photos in the hopes that it will inspire you to share your own Hammer experience with us.

Francis Upritchard has been making figurative sculptures—primarily using wire frames covered with a polymer modeling material that is then baked and painted—since 2006. Some hail from long-ago eras—protagonists of medieval mythology like the knight, the harlequin, the jester—while others are from the more recent past—beatniks, hippies, and other nonconformists.

Walking is a series of over 1,300 photos and a video animation made over a three to four year period of time, in different cities, always at night, using only the street and shop lights for illumination. It is simply the recording of a journey, walking on an endless road, without a map, to some distant and undefined destination.

Unless you happened to be outside the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1973, when Mierle Laderman Ukeles spent four hours scrubbing the stairs leading to the museum’s main entrance, or you attended the opening of Janine Antoni’s exhibition at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London in 1993, when the artist got on her hands and knees and mopped the floor with her hair, it is unlikely that you’ve entered a museum or gallery to be confronted by the quotidian subject of cleaning and maintaining the spaces in which we live and work.