A Transformed Hammer Museum Announces Inaugural Exhibitions for
Spring 2023 in the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center

Sweeping Exhibition of the Hammer’s Contemporary Art Collection is Joined by Installations by Chiharu Shiota, Rita McBride, and Sanford Biggers and a Retrospective Survey of the Drawings of Bridget Riley

UCLA Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin today announced the roster of spring 2023 exhibitions that will fill the institution’s Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center beginning March 26, when the Hammer marks the culmination of its two-decades-long project to remake itself inside and out.
 
Major new street-level exhibition spaces designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture include an expansive lobby that will house rotating installations of site-specific commissions, a new 5,600-square-foot gallery facing Wilshire Boulevard near Glendon Avenue, and an outdoor sculpture terrace at the corner of Wilshire and Glendon. When the Hammer celebrates the public opening of these new spaces, all of which are highly transparent from the outside, they will feature a dramatic installation work by Chiharu Shiota, a large-scale installation by Rita McBride, and a 25-foot-tall cast bronze sculpture by Sanford Biggers.
 
Within the museum, nearly all of the Hammer’s galleries will be dedicated to the Hammer Contemporary Collection. Anchored by Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, the suite of exhibitions will fill the majority of the galleries in the museum and will include installations and rotations of artworks emphasizing different strengths of the collection. Complementing Together in Time will be Full Burn: Video from the Hammer Contemporary Collection with works presented on a rotating basis every two weeks; Cruel Youth Diary: Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection, emphasizing works made in the 1990s and 2000s; as well as a series of solo presentations in the museum’s Vault gallery starting with Karon Davis and followed by Kaari Upson and Kara Walker. In June the museum will add Ecstatic: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, which will showcase sculpture and works on paper. Also on view is a retrospective of drawings by Bridget Riley in the recently opened works on paper gallery adjoining the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts.

Ann Philbin said, “Just as we’ve been transforming the museum over the last two decades, so too have we been building and transforming its collection. The Hammer has been actively acquiring contemporary art since 2005 and now has more than 4,000 objects in our collection. On March 26, we’ll welcome the public into a highly anticipated, thoroughly reimagined Hammer that now stretches the length of the entire city block along Wilshire, and we will put the Hammer Contemporary Collection in the spotlight as never before. I’m excited to showcase the Hammer curatorial team’s long-term vision in building an outstanding contemporary art collection that represents the diversity of our audiences and our community.”

Connie Butler, Chief Curator at the Hammer, said, “Planning for Together in Time has been a collaboration between Ann Philbin and the curatorial staff—including Aram Moshayedi, Erin Christovale, Ali Subotnick, and Vanessa Arizmendi—to think about focus areas of the collection and throughlines that have not been explored previously. We’ve been able to chart the history of contemporary art at the Hammer, with many of the works having been acquired from our biennial exhibition Made in L.A. and from our many acclaimed retrospectives and thematic exhibitions; created as part of the Artist in Residency Program; or presented as part of our signature Hammer Projects series of installations by artists working in Los Angeles and internationally.”

EXHIBITIONS COINCIDING WITH MARCH 26 OPENING

Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection
March 26 – August 20, 2023
The largest presentation of the Hammer Contemporary Collection in the museum’s history, Together in Time features more than 70 artworks in a range of media. The exhibition looks at contemporary art through the lens of Los Angeles and will feature works by artists including John Baldessari, Amoako Boafo, Lee Bontecou, Mark Bradford, Huguette Caland, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Noah Davis, Aria Dean, rafa esparza, Simone Forti, Owen Fu, Charles Gaines, Robert Gober, Eva Hesse, Tishan Hsu, Luchita Hurtado, Mike Kelley, Laura Owens, Noah Purifoy, Patssi Valdez, and many others. The overarching presentation will unfold as a series of exhibitions of works by Los Angeles–based and international artists, more than half of which have never gone on view at the Hammer since their acquisition. These include Knowledge of the Past is the Key to the Future: Waiting for Moses (1986) by Robert Colescott, Bend (2020) by Christina Fernandez, El olvido (2001) by Roberto Gil de Montes, and The Castle Of Perseverance (1978) by Roland Reiss, as well as artworks promised to the museum, including Xingyi Cheng’s The Second Kiss (2017), Kenturah Davis’s A Surreal Presence for Every Possible State (2018), and Ben Sakoguchi’s Towers (2014).

Together in Time begins with an untitled painting from 1958 by Lee Bontecou, which was a key work from the Hammer’s retrospective in 2003 that marked one of the institution’s first presentations under Philbin’s leadership. The exhibition continues with a series of discrete galleries that have in them different groupings of artists, many of whom have had their works featured in retrospectives at the Hammer, among them Llyn Foulkes, Jimmie Durham, and Allen Ruppersberg. Other artworks have been previously exhibited as part of the internationally acclaimed Hammer Projects, such as Ike Ya (2016) by Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Loosie in the Park (2019) by Tschabalala Self, or have shown in the museum’s biennial exhibition Made in L.A., such as Aqueduct Angel (2020) by Mario Ayala, bitter attendance, drown jubilee (2018) by Diedrick Brackens, Forced Perspective (Look on tha Bright Side) (2018) by Christina Quarles, and Luchita Hurtado’s Untitled (1969). Throughout the course of the exhibition, additional artworks will be cycled into rotation, including video installations by Banu Cenneto?lu, Bruce Conner, Ming Wong, and Kerry Tribe. The exhibition’s title is inspired by a video by Mario García Torres, which will also be on view.

Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection is organized by Ann Philbin with curatorial staff including Connie Butler, Aram Moshayedi, Erin Christovale, Ali Subotnick, and Vanessa Arizmendi.

Full Burn: Video from the Hammer Contemporary Collection
March 11 – September 10, 2023
This selection of video from the Hammer Contemporary Collection spans five decades and features landmark and more recent works, several of which have been included in past Made in L.A. biennial or Hammer Projects exhibitions. Featured artists include Zheng Bo, Tony Cokes, Alex Da Corte, Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, Mario García Torres, Kahlil Huffman, Jesper Just, Stanya Kahn, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Tala Madani, Joiri Minaya, Michele O’Marah, Alessandro Pessoli, James Richards, Frances Stark, Kenneth Tam, Akram Zaatari, and Mariah Garnett, whose video inspired the exhibition’s title. For this exhibition, a pair of artists will be featured in two to three-week intervals, with a total of 10 rotations over the course of the exhibition. Find a full schedule at hammer.ucla.edu

Rita McBride: Particulates
March 26, 2023 – Ongoing
The Hammer’s new street-level gallery opens with Particulates (2021), an installation by Rita McBride (b. 1960, Des Moines, Iowa) that is part of the Hammer Contemporary Collection. Inspired by time travel, the principles of light and space, and quantum physics, this monumental yet ethereal sculpture materializes as beams of lasers interact with a mist of water molecules and surfactant compounds. Particulates exchanges gravity, a core element in sculpture, for the potential of infinitely traversable space. The strange beams of light appear as an apparition inside the gallery, as if haunted by the residue of corporate architecture in the office tower designed by Edward Larabee Barnes. The sculpture can be experienced in the gallery during museum hours and will also be visible at night through the windows on Wilshire Boulevard, able to be seen by pedestrians or cars passing by the museum.

Rita McBride: Particulates is organized by Connie Butler, chief curator.

Rita McBride: Particulates is made possible by lead funding from Brenda R. Potter. Major support is provided by Hope Warschaw, with additional funding from Karen Hillenburg and Sebastian Clough.

Sanford Biggers: Oracle
March 26, 2023 – Ongoing
Inaugurating the sculpture terrace at Wilshire Boulevard and Glendon Avenue will be Sanford Biggers’ (b. 1970, Los Angeles) Oracle (2021), a 25-foot-tall, 7.64 US ton, cast bronze sculpture, co-presented by Art Production Fund. This monumental commission is a continuation of Biggers’ Chimera sculptures, a series of figurative sculptures created by combining various African and European masks, busts, and figures that explore historical depictions of the body and their subsequent myths, narratives, perceptions, and power. The head of Oracle is a composite of several masks and busts from different African cultures, including the Kingdom of Luba and the Maasai, whiles its seated posture makes reference to the statue of Zeus at Olympia. Intrigued by recent scholarship on the academic and historical “whitewashing” of classical Greco-Roman sculpture and its intersection with early twentieth century “blackwashing” of various African sculptural objects, Biggers challenges the associated cultural and aesthetic assumptions about the source materials of Oracle while acknowledging the often dubious provenances of the objects. Originally commissioned by Art Production Fund for Rockefeller Center, the sculpture is on loan to the Hammer Museum for its first West Coast presentation.

Sanford Biggers: Oracle is organized by Connie Butler, chief curator, with Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, curatorial assistant. The presentation at the Hammer is supported by Marianne Boesky Gallery and is co-presented by the Hammer and Art Production Fund. The exhibition is supported by Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia. 

Hammer Projects: Chiharu Shiota
March 26 – August 27, 2023
Continuing the Hammer’s long and celebrated history of featuring commissioned works on its lobby wall, Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972, Osaka) will be the inaugural artist featured in the Hammer’s newly renovated lobby. Her transportive site-specific installation will dialogue with the architecture of the space and immerse the viewer in a meditative environment constructed with hundreds of thousands of the artist’s red wool fibers. Titled The Network, the ephemeral piece will be one of Shiota’s only works whose subject matter is its own formal and poetic language, a performative approach to drawing in three-dimensional space, and reflects on the artists’ career, marked by an unwavering dedication to a singular material –yarn. In the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns and the closing of the museum, Shiota’s contemplative work is a reminder for its viewers to embark on the same process of looking back as we continue to move forward. Shiota is a Berlin-based artist whose installations, sculpture, and performance art invoke psychogeographic spaces of memory, emotions, and the cyclical nature of life and death. Using red, black, or white yarn as a base material, Shiota often creates meticulously webbed environments that span the length of entire galleries and mimic organic forms such as cobwebs, veins, and fractals. Shiota also includes a range of found objects in her work such as wooden chairs, abandoned shoes, rusted keys, and used dresses as a strategy to implicate the viewer in the artist’s personal narratives that are often universal experiences.

Hammer Projects: Chiharu Shiota is organized by Erin Christovale, curator, with Nika Chilewich, curatorial assistant.

Hammer Projects is presented in memory of Tom Slaughter and with support from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. Lead funding is provided by the Hammer Collective. Generous support is also provided by Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy, with additional support from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture.

Hammer Projects: Chiharu Shiota is made possible, in part, by Shah Garg Foundation, with additional support from The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles.

EXHIBITIONS OPENING IN FEBRUARY

Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio
February 4 – May 28, 2023
For Bridget Riley (b. 1931, London), the act of drawing is a process of selection, an essential way of discovering and resolving problems presented during the course of developing her abstract paintings. Drawing has remained a crucial part of Riley’s practice for more than six decades. Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio is the first and most extensive museum exhibition dedicated exclusively to the artist’s drawings in over half a century and the first major exhibition of her work at a West Coast museum. This exhibition presents approximately ninety sheets and covers the full range of Riley’s career, from her student days in the late 1940s, when she dedicated herself exclusively to drawing courses at Goldsmiths College in London, through her groundbreaking black-and-white optical works of the early 1960s, to the innovative color studies she has undertaken from the late 1960s to the present day. It includes rough studies; line drawings; tonal studies; preliminary works with written notations, tape, bands, and cut-and-pasted shapes; and highly finished drawings that stand as independent works. The majority of the drawings come from the artist’s studio, where they are retained as foundational elements crucial to her practice and always available for reference and reconsideration. The selection of works on view allows us to consider Riley’s practice from its earliest beginnings to the first decade of this century.

Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio is co-organized by the Hammer Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Morgan Library & Museum, and is curated by Cynthia Burlingham, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs, Hammer Museum, Jay Clarke, Rothman Family Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Rachel Federman, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings, the Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

Lead funding for Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist's Studio is provided by the Steinhauser Greenberg Exhibition Fund. The exhibition is also supported by the Ampersand Foundation and Lee Ramer.

Karon Davis: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection 
February 11 – April 9, 2023
Concurrent with Together in Time, the Hammer’s Vault gallery will host a rotation of three installations drawn from the Hammer Contemporary Collection. The first will be GAME (2019), by Los Angeles-based artist Karon Davis. Made up of three sculptures—Cat’s Cradle, Principal Lewis, and Stairway to Heaven—the trio of artworks offers a meditation on the persistence of gun violence in U.S. schools. Acquired by the Hammer in 2019, this will be the first time Davis’s installation is on view at the Hammer.

Karon Davis: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection is made possible by the Ariel Emanuel Family.

Two subsequent installations in the Vault gallery will feature Kaari Upson’s Unititled drawing installation from 2007 (on view April 22–June 18, 2023), and Kara Walker’s 1995 work The Battle of Atlanta: Being the Narrative of a Negress in the Flames of Desire - A Reconstruction (on view July 8–September 3, 2023), both of which were previously included in the artists’ Hammer Projects exhibitions in 2007 and 2008, respectively.

Cruel Youth Diary: Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection
February 15 – May 14, 2023
Selected from a recent major gift of works to the Hammer Contemporary Collection by the Haudenschild family, this presentation focuses on pioneering Chinese photography and video from the 1990s and early 2000s. This exhibition looks at a generation of artists whose work responded to a period of tremendous social, political, and economic change in mainland China. Through strategies of conceptual art, performance, and installation, these artists reflected on and critiqued the visual culture of a burgeoning new China on the cusp of the 21^st century. Cruel Youth Diary features works by Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Feng Mengbo, Hong Hao, Kan Xuan, Liu Wei, Shi Yong, Song Tao, Weng Fen, Xiang Liqing, Yang Fudong, Yang Yong, Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen, Zhao Bandi, and Zhu Jia.

Cruel Youth Diary: Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection is organized by Nicholas Barlow, curatorial assistant, with Aram Moshayedi, Robert Soros Senior Curator.

Cruel Youth Diary: Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection is made possible by East West Bank.

EXHIBITIONS OPENING JUNE 10

Ecstatic: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection
June 10 – August 27, 2023
Ecstatic, which takes its name from a work on view by Xavier Cha, provides insight into the Hammer’s approach toward exhibiting and collecting contemporary sculpture and works on paper. The two parts of the exhibition explore interrelations between these two essential modes of contemporary art and consider how these two- and three-dimensional forms can be understood as complements of one another. Ecstatic features works by a wide range of artists, including Kelly Akashi, Eddie Aparicio, Kevin Beasley, Fiona Connor, Liz Craft, Luis Flores, Katie Grinnan, Lauren Halsey, Simone Leigh, Paul McCarthy, Jennifer Moon, Shahryar Nashat, Senga Nengudi, Jim Shaw, Kenzi Shiokava, and more.

Ecstatic: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection is organized by Ann Philbin with curatorial staff including Connie Butler, Aram Moshayedi, Erin Christovale, Ali Subotnick, and Vanessa Arizmendi.

Support for the Transformation of the Hammer
In 2018, the Hammer announced a $180 million campaign to fund construction of its transformation and build the museum’s endowment. Leading the campaign was a $30 million gift from Lynda and Stewart Resnick, co-owners of The Wonderful Company and global philanthropists, in recognition of which the museum’s building was named the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center, and a $20 million gift from Marcy Carsey, chair of the Board of Directors.

Additional campaign gifts were generously contributed by Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation, Annenberg Foundation, Erika J Glazer, Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy, Jarl and Pamela Mohn, Darren Star, Linda and Jerry Janger, Y & S Nazarian Family Foundation, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, Estate of Margo Leavin, Leslie and Bill McMorrow, Chara Schreyer, Robert Soros, Jiwon Choi and Steven Song, The Ahmanson Foundation, Beth Rudin DeWoody and The May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Alice and Nahum Lainer Family Foundation, Susan and Larry Marx, Cindy Miscikowski, The Joy and Jerry Monkarsh Family Foundation, Chip and Kathleen Rosenbloom, The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, Susan Steinhauser, Daniel Greenberg and The Greenberg Foundation, Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Barbara Timmer, Linda and Bob Gersh, Dori Peterman Mostov and Charles H. Mostov, Michael Rubel and Kristin Rey, and Ron Watson. 

The campaign to date has achieved $156 million of its goal.