Hammer Museum

For #MiLAMondays, we wanted to give you a glimpse into the studios of Made in L.A. 2020 artists. Christina Forrer’s practice is rooted in a tradition of tapestry and invested in the materials that construct such works, carefully weaving in color to create eclectic palettes and crafty, abject characters. Crude figures argue, revolt, and assault one another; the compositions depict scenes of violence, torture, and aggressive embrace.

"Each gallery felt like a mini-conversation between a few artists in the show." Learn more about Made in L.A. 2020 from KCRW:

A central focus of Jeffrey Stuker’s work is mimicryboth in nature, where it provides a strategy for the survival of certain species, and in digital imaging, which can manifest hyper-lifelike representations of reality. For #MadeInLA2020, Stuker produced work exclusively through 3-D rendering processes, focusing on the Papilio clytia, also known as common mime, which imitates the markings of the Euploea core. The voice-over narrates the story of the species via obscure anecdotes as well as scientific information such as the origins of the Monte Carlo algorithm, which is both a subject of the video and the tool that produced the images that constitute it. As these images exist as part simulation and part documentation, their factualness remains elusive.

Take a stroll around MacArthur Park to catch Larry Johnson's five #MadeInLA2020 billboards. These site-specific works quote their cultural environment, serving as poetic interventions into space and local geography. Image and text work in cryptically critical ways, celebrating the veneer and vices of Hollywood and Los Angeles through shorthand phrases, logos, and slogans. Johnson's billboards are coproduced by The Billboard Creative for Made in L.A. 2020. Learn more: https://bit.ly/34jzMRo

Never before Rembrandt had an artist made so many self-portraits. He imagined himself with many different identities and outfitted himself with a large wardrobe of costumes he’d bought, many of them exotic or old-fashioned. The fourth of our #Rembrandt lecture series with art historian John Walsh considers these self-portraits and explores the artist’s motives in making them. RSVP and join us TODAY at 2 p.m. PDT!

Artist rafa esparza discusses the fraught colonized framework of the arts, from museums to publications. This clip is from esparza's Nov 2020 UCLA Department of Art lecture. Watch the full lecture: https://bit.ly/3nyTlvI

IT'S TIME TO VOTE! The Hammer is an official 11-day vote center, where you can vote in person OR drop off your ballot. Sat Oct 24Mon Nov 2 we're open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day Tue Nov 3 we're open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.... Check out our website to learn more about voting at the Hammer: https://bit.ly/3kYHLJ8

Nicola L. was born in 1932 in Morocco and died in 2019 in Los Angeles, where her estate is now based. Nicola L.’s oeuvre is full of humor and witmen as sofas, knobs as nipples, unchaste applications of faux furwhile tackling representations of the body and the social persona. While living in Paris in 1960, Nicola L. started developing her Pénétrables, a series of canvases into which viewers could introduce parts of their bodies, getting into the skin of the painting. A magn...um opus of this series, 'La Chambre en Fourrure' (1969) was conceived as a playful environment, and yet it conveyed a strong political statement addressing the individual’s social envelope. The version of 'La Chambre en Fourrure' on view here is a reconstruction of the original based on documentation compiled by the estate. Because of new restrictions aimed at limiting the spread of COVID-19, this work will not be activated during #MadeInLA2020. See more

Alexandra Noel’s small-scale paintings focus on familiar subjects in far-flung imaginary settings or tragic scenarios, simultaneously surreal and recognizable. Her compact panels reference relationships of scale between the body and handheld devices, treated as images on-screenzoomed in, cropped, stretched, or rescaled. For Made in L.A. 2020, Noel presents both found and imagined images with an emphasis on themes of creation, as well as ruminations on siblings and doubles. She strives to elicit a déjà vu effect through subtle differences between the twin sets of works at the Hammer and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

'Contagion' writer Scott Z. Burns discusses the connections between climate change, human incursion into wild spaces, and virusesincluding the current novel coronavirus. Watch the full program: https://bit.ly/33Y1X8z

The Hammer's annual Family Day, in collaboration with The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, is right around the corner! Create creepy, spooky, and fun artwork with the help of two artists from Made in L.A. 2020, Ann Greene Kelly and Umar Rashid, just in time for Halloween. Make your way over to our website and get your artmaking started (if you dare!) Family Day 2020 is made possible by J. P. Morgan Private Bank

Our congratulations to Kapwani Kiwanga for receiving the 2020 Prix Marcel Duchamp! Kiwanga's 'Flowers for Africa' (2014) was on display at the Hammer in 2018 as part of the exhibition 'Stories of Almost Everyone.' Throughout the 20th century, arrangements of cut flowers played witness to the ceremonies that granted African countries their independence from colonial rule. In some instances, the flowers were regionally specific, while in others they were as foreign as the colonial presence that had ceded control. In the transitions that defined the postcolonial era, there was perhaps no better metaphor than the cut flower, a decorative offering that would decay and that could never outlast the injustices that had been dealt to the African continent by European powers.

Prep for the CA Props! In our latest Hammer Forum series, we examined Prop 15, Prop 16, Prop 17 & Prop 25 with experts in the field. Tune in, study up, and go vote!

Artist and UCLA Arts professor Hirsch Perlman created a series of photographs documenting handmade isolated explosions on his Los Angeles rooftop. This particular image was captured on one of the last nights that he still had a rooftop studio (his landlord evicted him soon after). Perlman colorized only two images in the series, which he printed in a large format that he hoped would "accentuate the 'cartoonyness.' They seem to be blobs, things from outer space, as much as they might be explosions."

This election cycle, campaigns, governments, and others are using both familiar and emerging technologiesfrom social media and bots to artificial intelligence and algorithmsto polarize voters, spread false narratives, sow confusion, and drown out the truth. Loyola Law School professor Jessica Levinson speaks with The Atlantic's McKay Coppins, AI For the People founding CEO Mutale Nkonde, and University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism assistant professor Samuel Woolley about how the 2020 election will be impacted by information warfare. RSVP and join us tomorrow 10/21 at 5 p.m. PDT:

Expressive yet formally rigorous, Laida Lertxundi’s filmsas seen in Made in L.A. 2016present us with enigmatic landscapes and inscrutable characters whose relationships to one another are complicated by her idiosyncratic use of sound and music. Her work is inextricably connected to the California landscape and psyche, bringing a heightened sense of place to her film practice. Lertxundi represents Los Angeles as a lived-in space, and yet, as she says, "to shoot in Los Angeles, a contested space, is meaningful as a practice in itself. Even if I’m just filming a light post, it is exciting to me, because it is as if I am reclaiming this space."

Join us tomorrow night as celebrated writers Scott Z. Burns, Amitav Ghosh, and Elizabeth Kolbert discuss how the art of storytelling has failed to take on the climate crisis and its attendant catastrophesand how that might change. RSVP and tune in 10/20 at 5 p.m. PDT:

The third of our six-part Rembrandt van Rijn lecture series with art historian John Walsh is this afternoon! Discover how the artist's prints, rather than his paintings, were responsible for his widespread fame during his lifetime. RSVP and join us at 2 p.m. PDT!

Cast your ballot at the Hammer! We're an official 11-day Vote Center for the presidential electionopen from Saturday, October 24 to Tuesday, November 3where you can either vote in person or drop off your ballot. Learn more and make a voting plan:

Sean Morales-Doyle, deputy director of voting rights and elections for the Brennan Center for Justice, discusses the purpose of parole and how voting and participating in democracy are essential pieces of the social contract. Watch the full CA Prop 17 program: https://bit.ly/36FaZsz