DAVID HAMMONS

Emerging in Los Angeles in the late 1960s with his influential ‘Body Prints’, Hammons went on to create works such as The Door (Admissions Office) (1969), Injustice Case (1970), Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), How Ya Like Me Now? (1988), In the Hood (1993), and Untitled (hair) (1992), now widely recognised as key artworks addressing the Black experience and structural racism. His work has been presented at major institutions including MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as at leading galleries such as Hauser & Wirth, Mnuchin Gallery, and White Cube.

In recent years Hammons’ practice has continued to draw international attention through the restaging of his immersive installation Concerto in Black and Blue at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles in 2025, and his inclusion in high-profile group exhibitions including What It Becomes at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2025). In 2026 his work is scheduled to appear in the two-person exhibition David Hammons and Jannis Kounellis at White Cube, New York (30 April–13 June 2026), and in the group show Late at night, early in the morning, at noon across Hauser & Wirth’s New York and Los Angeles spaces (15 January–16 August 2026).

Early life and Career

Born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois, Hammons grew up as the youngest of ten children in a working-class African American family, a background that sharpened his awareness of the daily realities of race and poverty in the United States. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, studying at Los Angeles Trade Technical College before enrolling at Chouinard Art Institute and Otis Art Institute, where he worked closely with socially engaged painter Charles White, known for dignified realist portraits of Black Americans; Hammons graduated from Chouinard (now CalArts) in 1968.

Los Angeles was then a centre of the Black Arts Movement and a flashpoint for the Black Power era, in the wake of events such as the assassination of Malcolm X and the Watts rebellion. Hammons’ peers included Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, and other artists committed to overtly political cultural work, and it was in this context that he began his celebrated Body Prints around 1968—coating his body with grease, pressing it onto paper, and sprinkling pigment to create ghostly, hyper-detailed silhouettes that often satirised racial stereotypes and responded to police and state violence.

In 1974 Hammons relocated to New York City, settling in Harlem and shifting his practice from studio-based printmaking to interventions in the street and other public spaces. New York’s sidewalks, vendors, and informal economies became an extended studio, and Hammons adopted a deliberate elusiveness—often skipping his own openings and avoiding interviews—that has become central to both his legend and his critique of art-world spectacle; in 2002 critic Peter Schjeldahl described him as possessing a “poetic compound of modesty, truculence, and wit.”

Works, Methods and Key series

Hammons works across media using strategies of refusal, humour, and provocation, often centring his own experience as a Black American while engaging questions of race, class, art history, and the legacy of slavery. The Body Prints remain foundational: The Door (Admissions Office) (1969) layers spectral hand and face prints around a door labelled “ADMISSIONS OFFICE”, aligning a physical threshold with institutional racism in higher education, while Injustice Case (1970) depicts a bound and gagged figure referencing Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale’s courtroom treatment, turning the print technique into a form of political witness.

Through the late 1970s and 1980s Hammons developed sculptural and performative works that used cheap, marginal, or discarded materials to probe racial stereotypes and the circulation of value in art. His “Spade” works use shovels and the spade motif to twist racist imagery into sharp visual puns, while the elusive action Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983)—selling snowballs of different sizes on a Manhattan sidewalk—satirised both the commodification of art and the precarious economies of Black street vendors. Other projects from this period include Higher Goals (1987), a set of towering bottle-cap-covered basketball hoops installed in Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza Park, which comments on the widespread belief that professional sport is the primary route out of poverty for young Black men.

Hammons’ work of the 1980s also includes guerilla-style interventions that recalled Duchamp’s insolence, such as Pissed Off and Shoe Tree (both 1981), in which he urinated on and threw shoes over Richard Serra‘s sculpture TWU in TriBeCa, challenging monumental public sculpture and the hierarchies of the art world. He continued to use fragile, abject materials: in Untitled (1992), a small rock covered with hair swept from Harlem barbershops resembles a human head and reflects his interest in self-identification and Arte Povera, while Untitled (dung) (1983–85) uses dung as sculptural matter, unsettling viewers and extending his critique of value and taste.

From the 1990s onwards Hammons refined a minimalist yet symbolically dense language, often isolating a single charged object or gesture. In the Hood (1993)—a severed hood from a sweatshirt pinned to the wall—has become one of his most widely reproduced works; although made long before the killing of Trayvon Martin, it has been reread through the Black Lives Matter movement and the racialisation of the hoodie, showing how a simple garment can carry intertwined associations of threat and vulnerability. Works such as Basketball Chandelier, a hoop fitted with a crystal net and ornate glass backboard, extend his critique of aspirational glamour and the idea of professional sport as a pathway out of poverty.

Large-scale installations and environments remain central to Hammons’ practice. Concerto in Black and Blue (2002, restaged 2025) turns a darkened exhibition space into a field navigated only by visitors’ blue flashlights, making perception, disorientation, and mutual visibility the core of the work. His monumental public sculpture Day’s End (2014–21), realised with the Whitney Museum of American Art on Manhattan’s Hudson River, outlines in open steel the ghost of a demolished pier and pays homage to Gordon Matta-Clark‘s 1975 intervention of the same name, while also placing his work at the centre of debates about institutional expansion, waterfront redevelopment, and the politics of public art.

Themes, Strategies and Context

Hammons’ practice is best known for how it addresses the complexities of African American experience through strategies of humour, refusal, and misdirection. He frequently adopts a trickster stance—appearing to play along with expectations only to undermine them—whether selling snowballs as if they were luxury commodities, performing unsanctioned actions around major public sculptures, or disappearing from art-world events, thereby turning his own visibility into a key part of the work.

Exhibitions, Collections and Recent activity

Hammons’ work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and influential surveys, including the landmark retrospective Rousing the Rubble 1969–1990 at MoMA PS1, New York (1990–91), which helped cement his reputation as one of the most important American artists of his generation. He has since presented significant solo shows at venues such as L&M Arts in New York, the Drawing Center, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, and galleries now within the Hauser & Wirth network, while his works feature in major museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, Tate, SFMOMA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Pinault Collection.

In the mid-2020s Hammons has remained prominent through high-visibility institutional projects and carefully chosen exhibitions. Concerto in Black and Blue was restaged at Hauser & Wirth’s Los Angeles Arts District complex from February to June 2025, bringing a new generation of viewers into one of his most immersive environments. Over 2024–25 he appeared in group exhibitions such as What It Becomes at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Pop Forever: Tom Wesselmann &... at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Flags: A Group Show at Paula Cooper Gallery, and Portrait Of a Collection: Selected Works from the Pinault Collection at SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation, underscoring the global reach of his work across New York, Paris, and Seoul.

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Ocula | 2026