Displaying items by tag: hammer museum

This February, the Hammer Museum at UCLA presents the West Coast debut of “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957,” the first comprehensive U.S. museum exhibition on Black Mountain College, a small, experimental school in North Carolina which had a profound impact that continues to influence art practice and pedagogy today.

The exhibition, which will run from Feb. 21 through May 15, 2016, chronicles how Black Mountain College became a seminal meeting place and dynamic crossroads for many of the artists, musicians, poets and thinkers who would become leading practitioners of the postwar period.

The Hammer Museum at UCLA is expanding its footprint in Westwood, taking over five floors of the Occidental Petroleum office tower that will give the contemporary art institution more than 30% additional exhibition and administrative space.

Until recently, the Hammer had leased its space from Occidental. Officials at the Hammer and UCLA said Monday that the expansion is part of a recent real estate deal in which the university has become the Hammer's new landlord.

The home where Abstract Expressionist giant Willem de Kooning had his first East Hampton’s studio in the leafy hamlet of Springs back in 1961 has opened its doors as part of an artist-in-residence program. A community of skilled creative types will live and create on the estate.

But the retreat, which began its fledgling residency this past May, is not exactly what you might expect when you hear the name de Kooning. The newest artist-in-residence program is not a visual-artists’ residency like the ones at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, the Walker Art Center, or Artpace.

As a technique for creating art, frottage is so closely identified with Surrealism, in general, and Max Ernst, in particular, that the link itself might be an example of the technique.

"Frottage" is French for "rubbing," and it rubbed off on the boisterous Surrealist movement that in the troubled decades between the two World Wars was dedicated to unleashing the creative potential of the unconscious mind. When a sheet of paper is laid over a textured surface and rubbed with pencil or pastel, unexpected and evocative shapes, forms and tonalities can be produced.

The Hammer Museum announced Thursday that its next biennial art show, Made in L.A. 2016, will be co-curated by Hamza Walker of the Renaissance Society in Chicago and the Hammer's own Aram Moshayedi.

Combining a curator who has worked extensively in Los Angeles for the last 10 years with someone from outside the region, Moshayedi said, will help the program to examine regional art in relation to national and international art scenes.

A new pedestrian bridge by architect Michael Maltzan that crosses the courtyard of the Hammer Museum will open early next year, officials said Wednesday, and will connect the most trafficked galleries to those that new visitors are most likely to miss.

The 33.5-foot bridge will probably open for use at the beginning of February, the Westwood museum said. A ribbon-cutting ceremony is scheduled for Feb. 24.

"We have long wanted a bridge built to improve the flow of our space and connect the permanent and temporary galleries," Hammer Director Ann Philbin said. She added that the bridge will help new visitors find their way to the permanent collection gallery.

It's not the sort of thing you generally see in a museum: a comfortable easy chair, a working TV set turned to an afternoon talk show on which "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" mom Kris Jenner is making salsa.

But this unlikely arrangement is, in fact, a work of art, on view as part of the Hammer Museum's Robert Heinecken retrospective, "Object Matter." The longtime L.A. artist, who passed away in 2006, was known for his pioneering use of found photographs in sculptural assemblages and vast wall installations. He was also known for undertaking guerrilla actions, such as surreptitiously printing images into new editions of "Time" magazine and then returning the copies to the newsstand. (San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art has an example.)

The Hammer Museum announced on Wednesday exhibition plans for winter and spring that include the first L.A. solo show for Mexican artist Pedro Reyes and the first American show for the London-based Heatherwick architecture studio.

Another first: "Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974-1989," which comes to the Hammer from the Studio Museum in Harlem, and opens Feb. 7. It represents the first comprehensive survey of the prominent conceptual artist's work while he lived and taught in Fresno, before he came to Los Angeles.

A measure of respect is due any artist who has the nerve to take on a revered masterpiece in the history of art, aspiring to remake it according to a conception of new conditions in the present. That's what Jim Hodges did in 2008 with a sculpture born of Albrecht Dürer's famous watercolor that shows a chunk of wet mud sprouting a clump of bristling weeds.

Arguably, Dürer's "The Great Piece of Turf" (1503) is the greatest drawing in all of Western art. Hodges' take on it, a delicate glass sculpture sealed inside a nearly 3-foot-tall bell jar, is one of 56 works in the 25-year retrospective of his career concluding its national tour at the UCLA Hammer Museum. "Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take," jointly organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and Minneapolis' Walker Art Center, continues through Jan. 18.

The Hammer Museum will fete Los Angeles visual artist Mark Bradford and singer Joni Mitchell at its annual gala scheduled for Oct. 11. The Gala in the Garden is a key fundraiser for the Westwood museum, which raised $2 million at last year's event.

Hammer officials said that the couple Emily Blunt and John Krasinski will serve as co-chairs of the gala. The event is also being chaired by Danna and Ed Ruscha, and Tomas Maier. Proceeds from the gala will support museum exhibitions and public programming.