Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960ã¢â“1980

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  America the Cute (1968)

  David Hammons

  This striking work is from a series of "body prints" that David Hammons made early in his career, soon after his arrival in Los Angeles in 1963. To create these prints, Hammons made impressions of his own face, arms, and body by covering his body with oil or margarine, pressing it against a canvass of paper, and then sprinkling paint on the surface. For America the Beautiful, the artist used lithography to add the American flag that envelops the key effigy. Hammons created this piece of work in 1968, toward the end of the civil rights move and the starting time of the black power movement. The assertive combination of a patriotic symbol with the body of a blackness man (the artist) underscores the heightened racial tensions in the U.s.a. during this period.

  Lithograph and body impress 39 ten 29 1/two in
  Drove of the Oakland Museum of California, The Oakland Museum Founders Fund

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  Handbag Lady in Flying (ca. 1970)

  David Hammons

  
  Shopping numberless, grease, and hair 42 1/2 x 116 1/2 x iii one/2 in
  Collection Eileen Norton, Santa Monica, California

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  Ghetto Merchant (1966)

  John Thomas Riddle

  Ghetto Merchant was created from concrete remnants of the rebellions and most probably shown in the 66 Signs of Neon exhibition. Anthropomorphic in sensibility, information technology incorporates a burned-upwardly cash annals equally its core element, its wiry keys a skeletal trunk. This is topped by an "empty" head formed from the negative space in a metal fragment and held upwardly past spindly steel legs, an apt metaphor for a figure that preyed on the Watts community.

  Mixed media 41 x eighteen 1/4 in
  Collection of Claude and Ann Booker, Los Angeles

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  Blackness Daughter'south Window (1969)

  Betye Saar

  Betye Saar was first to integrate actual historical objects, so-called "black collectibles," into her pieces. By incorporating them Saar sought to consume their ability, to enact concrete and artistic cannibalization, and thus drain their negative magic.

  Assemblage 35 3/4 x 18 x 1 one/2 in
  Collection of the artist; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York

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  Untitled (1973)

  Fred Eversley

  
  Cast polyester resin 20 10 20 x 7 in
  Collection of the artist

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  Maren Hassinger (Appointment unknown)

  Maren Hassinger

  In graduate schoolhouse at UCLA in the early 1970s, Maren Hassinger discovered what would become a pivotal medium for her: wire rope. In her hands, this fabric came to embody the irresolute landscape of American sculpture from minimal to postminimal: information technology was a constructed substance that, with subtle intervention, could echo organic grade. These solid and industrial, nevertheless procedure-driven sculptures become the “initiators” of activity; lending themselves to the temporality of performance. For “Now Dig This!,” the Hammer Museum commissioned re-creations of historical work by artists Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger. As part of Hassinger'due south residency, she crafted a piece inspired by an installation of her sculpture at Los Angeles'due south Arco Center for Visual Art in 1976.

  Photograph by Jerry McMillan

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  The Lifted X (1965)

  Melvin Edwards

  
  Steel 65 x 45 x 22 in
  Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY; Courtesy of the artist

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  Family (1967)

  Samella Lewis

  
  Linocut on rice paper 15 3/viii x 15 5/8 in
  Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, The Oakland Museum Income Purchase Fund

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  Senga Nengudi, Performance with R.South.Five.P.X (1977)

  Senga Nengudi

  In the 1970s, Nengudi created what would become her signature works, complimentary course sculptures constructed primarily from pantyhose and sand. They were tied and knotted, shaped, twisted, and suspended from walls and ceilings. Their very material and anthropomorphic form certainly suggested the trunk in motion. However, their pliant nature was not just part of an anti-sculptural, ecology orientation, or feminist begetting. They were supposed to exist interacted with: caressed, fondled, and stroked by the artist every bit well equally viewers. For Now Dig This!, the Hammer Museum commissioned re-creations of such historical work past Senga Nengudi.

  Nylon, mesh, and rose petals
  Photo by Ken Peterson

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  Holy Family (ca. 1965)

  William Pajaud

  Pajaud's biblically themed watercolor Holy Family is indicative of his artistic thinking during this period, with its delicate ink drawing combined with washes of floating color.

  Watercolor, pen, and ink on paper xv x 20 in
  Welton Jones, WAJ Collectibles

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  Viet Nam War Games (1969)

  Dale Brockman Davis

  
  Clay and metallic Variable dimensions: 48 x 48 in
  Collection of the creative person © Dale Brockman Davis

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  Apparitional Visitations (1973)

  Suzanne Fitzallen Jackson

  
  Acrylic launder on canvas 54 ten 72 in
  Collection of Vaughn C. Payne, Jr., Grand.D. Photograph past Ed Glendinning

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  Untitled (Assemblage) (1967)

  Noah Purifoy

  
  Mixed media 66 10 39 x 8 in
  Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Museum Buy, the William A. Clark Fund and Souvenir of Dr. Samella Lewis © Courtesy the Noah Purifoy Foundation

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  Dearest Letter #ane (1971)

  Charles White

  
  Lithograph with documents 22 three/sixteen x xxx in
  Individual drove. Photo by Ed Glendinning © C. Ian White

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  No Time for Jivin', from the Containment Series (1969)

  John Outterbridge

  
  Mixed media 56 x sixty in
  Mills College Fine art Museum Collection. Purchased with funds from the Susan L. Mills Fund. Photo: Ed Glendinning © Mills Higher Arts Museum

Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles

Now Dig This! Fine art and Blackness Los Angeles 1960-1980

This comprehensive exhibition examines the incredibly vital just often overlooked legacy of Los Angeles's African American visual artists, featuring works from public and private collections located across the country, some of which have not been seen for decades and were previously considered lost. Now Dig This! volition feature artists including Melvin Edwards, Fred Eversley, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Alonzo Davis, Dale Brockman Davis, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, and Charles White, presenting their creative output alongside parallel developments and teasing out the connections amid individuals and groups of unlike ethnic origins. This multicultural component will bring to light a meaning network of friendships and collaborations across racial lines, while underscoring the influence that African American artists had on the era's larger movements and trends.

10/02/2011 – 01/08/2012

Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles

10899 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90024

http://hammer.ucla.edu/

francoards1961.blogspot.com

Source: http://pacificstandardtime.org/past/artinla/exhibitions_id=now-dig-this-art-and-black-los-angeles-1960-1980.html