Hammons, David

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David Hammons

1943—

Sculptor, installation artist

Chicken bones, basketballs, snowballs, human hair, and sledgehammers are certainly not the stuff of traditional art, but all these items, and more, find a home in the work of the contemporary African-American artist David Hammons. Best known for his work in the 1970s and 1980s in New York City, Hammons used primarily found objects and unconventional techniques to create three-dimensional, mixed-medium sculptures and installations that comment, often in biting and ironic ways, on race and culture in America. His art may be best described as "anti-art."

Not surprisingly then, Hammons is someone who provokes strong reactions in the art world: While some hailed him as a postmodern genius, others wrote him off as overrated. But one thing is clear: Hammons could not care less what the art world thinks of him. He said in a 1986 interview with Kellie Jones of Real Life magazine, "The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It's overly educated, it's conservative, it's out to criticize not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?"

Never Liked Art

David Raymond Hammons was born in Springfield, Illinois, on July 24, 1943, the youngest of ten children of a struggling single mother. Early on, he was tracked into vocational courses. Though he clearly had an aptitude for drawing and other media, he decided that art was not a serious pursuit. As he told Jones, "I've never, ever liked art, ever. I never took it in school." In 1962 he moved to Los Angeles, where he attended the Los Angeles Trade Tech College, the Chouinard Art Institute, and then the Otis Art Institute of the Parsons School of Design.

Hammons was inspired by the avant-garde art scene in Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, he was influenced by Dada, an early twentieth-century movement that embraced deliberate irrationalism and rejected traditional notions of art, and by Arte Povera (Italian for "poor art"), a style in which artists use found objects and free media to create works of art. Many art critics have compared Hammons's work with that of the French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp, who employed everyday, "ready-made" objects to artistic effect.

During this time, Hammons earned a reputation for his use of a technique called "body printing" (also known as monoprinting). He applied grease to his body and clothing and pressed himself against a board, then fixed the image by dusting it with powdered paint, which would adhere to the grease. The resulting image resembled a photographic negative. Hammons sometimes combined these body prints with silk-screen designs or found objects to create three-dimensional, multitextural works. Hammons sold or gave away many of these prints, never exhibiting them formally. In 2006 thirty of Hammons's body prints were collected and exhibited at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City.

Throughout his body of work, Hammons explored racial and cultural stereotypes, often turning them on their head and thereby rendering them absurd. In 1973 he began his Spade series by using a garden shovel to play on and reappropriate the derogatory term for African Americans. In Spade in Chains, a rusted spade is wrapped in chains, looking like a human torso adorned with necklaces. Hammons told Jones, "I was trying to figure out why black people were called spades, as opposed to clubs. Because I remember being called a spade once, and I didn't know what it meant…. So I took the shape, and started painting it."

Found Art in Everyday Life

In the mid-1970s Hammons moved from Los Angeles to Harlem, an area that he described as the "spiritual center" of black culture in America. There he drew inspiration from street life, assembling into sculpture and installations everyday objects that he viewed as the detritus of African-American culture, such as chicken bones, wine bottles, shopping bags, greasy wrappers, bottle caps, and human hair, which he collected from African-American barbershops. In doing so, Hammons believed his art was more "aesthetically correct" than "clean" works produced using traditional media.

Hammons disdained the commercialization of the art world, an attitude he demonstrated in his 1983 performance piece Blizzard Ball Sale, when he sold snowballs during a blizzard on the sidewalk outside Cooper Union, a revered art school in New York City.

In his 1983 installation Higher Goals, Hammons placed basketball hoops atop impossibly high telephone poles decorated with bottle caps arranged in abstract patterns. The commissioned work, originally installed on a vacant lot at 125th Street in Harlem, commented on the futile belief among the neighborhood's African-American youth that basketball was their ticket out of the ghetto. The work was installed again in 1986 at a location in Brooklyn.

Basketball was a subject to which Hammons would return again and again throughout his career. In the 1999 sculpture High Falutin', a basketball hoop is fashioned out of an old wood window frame fringed with a rubber tire and placed on a pole. In Basketball Drawing (2001), Hammons created an image by coating a basketball in chalk and bouncing it against a gallery wall. In another series, he inserted basketballs into vessels with extremely narrow openings.

A 1989 incident demonstrated how Hammons's racial images often provoke strong responses. In December of that year, Hammons created a fourteen-by-sixteen-foot enamel on tin portrait of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, rendering him in whiteface with blue eyes. Scrawled across the portrait was the phrase "How Ya Like Me Now?" The work was installed on a Washington, DC, street as part of a show titled "The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism," which was sponsored by the Washington Project for the Arts. Within moments of its installation, a group of young black men took sledgehammers to the work, which they believed mocked Jackson. In fact, Hammons had meant to suggest that white voters might find Jackson more palatable if he looked more like them. The artist later rebuilt the work, exhibiting it in a gallery surrounded by a barricade of sledgehammers.

Later in his career, Hammons experimented with the video medium. His 1995 work Phat Free (originally titled Kick the Bucket) simply features a man kicking a tin can down a New York City street. Like Hammons's earlier found object sculptures, the work takes as its subject the mundane, everyday life of Harlem. The video was first exhibited at the Whitney Biennial exhibition in 1997 and again in 2004 at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In 2007 Hammons mounted an unusual exhibition at the fashionable L & M Arts on New York's Upper East Side, a space that he handpicked, much to the surprise of the gallery owners. The untitled show, a collaboration with his wife, Chie Hammons, displayed a series of elegant and expensive fur coats, the backs of which were defaced with paint and, in one case, a blowtorch.

At a Glance …

Born David Raymond Hammons on July 24, 1943, in Springfield, IL; married Rebecca Williams, February 13, 1966 (divorced, 1972); married Chie Hasegawa, August 15, 2003. Education: Los Angeles Trade Tech College, 1964-65; Chouinard Art Institute, 1966-68; Otis Art Institute of the Parsons School of Design, 1968-72.

Career: Sculptor and installation artist, 1960s—.

Awards: National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1983-84; New York State Council on the Arts Award, 1983-84; Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award, 1983-84; Art Matters Award, New York Foundation for the Arts, 1987; Tiffany Grant, 1990; Brendan Gill Award, Municipal Art Society, 1991; Prix de Rome for Sculpture, American Academy of Rome, 1991; MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 1991; DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Award, 1992; Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 2005; American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellowship, 2008.

Addresses: Agent—Jack Tilton Galley, 49 Greene St., New York, NY 10013.

Whereas in his earlier work Hammons had elevated everyday objects to the level of art, here he degraded garments that wealthy patrons might consider beautiful.

Disdained the Art World

Throughout his career, Hammons expressed contempt for the art world, frequently refusing to participate in notable exhibitions or sign with galleries, preferring instead to show his work in small and untraditional spaces. Furthermore, he remained reclusive and notoriously evaded discussions of his work's "meaning."

Nevertheless, Hammons received many awards for his work, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 2008 he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.