Hammer Museum

For more than 30 years, the Los Angeles–based artist Andrea Bowers (b. 1965, Wilmington, Ohio) has made art that activates. She combines artistic practice with activism and advocacy, speaking to deeply entrenched inequities as well as the generations of activists working to create a more just world. Bowers has built an international reputation as a chronicler of contemporary history, documenting activism as it unfolds and collecting research on the front lines of protest. Her practice contends with issues such as immigration rights, workers’ rights, climate justice, and women’s rights, illustrating the shared pursuit of justice that connects them.
Andrea Bowers, the first museum retrospective surveying more than two decades of the artist’s production, traces the entire scope and evolution of her work. Bringing together approximately 60 works as well as a trove of ephemera, the exhibition reflects Bowers’s embrace and experimentation with a wide range of mediums, including drawing, performance, installation, sculpture, video, and neon sculptures.
Andrea Bowers is organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The exhibition is co-curated by Michael Darling, formerly the James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Connie Butler, Chief Curator of the Hammer Museum, with Nika Chilewich, curatorial assistant, Hammer Museum.

The moon has been bound to life and consciousness since the beginning of humankind. It has served elemental and vital functions such as providing light and measuring time, but it has also influenced the more ethereal and spiritual realms of gods, myths, and magic. This exhibition operates at the crux of a lunar spectrum, between the lure and mystery of the unattainable moon and the eternal quest to conquer the moon in its material form. Drawn primarily from institutional collections in Los Angeles, the survey leads visitors through a panoply of objects dating from antiquity to the present.
Drawing Down the Moon is organized by Allegra Pesenti, former associate director and senior curator, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum.

Between Starshine and Clay (2022) marks the first solo museum exhibition for artist Kiyan Williams (b. 1991, Newark, New Jersey) and is an installation that takes its name from an phrase in writer and educator Lucille Clifton’s 1993 poem "won’t you celebrate with me." Williams, who collects earth from familial sites and spaces that hold Black American histories, creates sculptural forms that slowly reveal traces and gestures of the body. Using dirt, sandstone, and other materials such as kanekalon hair, bricks, and wax to mold faces, limbs, and hands, Williams meditates on the notion of the “ruined” body and its potential to transcend and generate new genealogies.
Hammer Projects: Kiyan Williams is organized by Erin Christovale, associate curator.
Hammer

This second presentation in the Hammer Museum’s new works on paper gallery highlights acquisitions of the last decade as well as important promised gifts. The exhibition includes numerous prints and drawings in the collection by artists such as Joan Brown, Robert Gober, Fernanda Gomes, Sonia Gomes, Roni Horn, Jasper Johns, Helen Lundeberg, Nam June Paik, Martin Puryear, Carolee Schneemann, and Barbara T. Smith. Also featured is a selection of photography-based works by Wallace Berman, Morgan Fisher, Helen Levitt, Paul Strand, and Minor White. The exhibition includes significant gifts from the estate of iconic Los Angeles art dealer and philanthropist Margo Leavin.
A Decade of Acquisitions of Works on Paper – Part II is organized by Cynthia Burlingham, deputy director for curatorial affairs and director of the Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts, and Connie Butler, chief curator.