David Hammons

Ulysses Jenkins composed "Dream City" from documentation of a twenty-four-hour performance he organized in collaboration with David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, and Senga Nengudi. A discordant, absurdist, and poetic montage, the video weaves together jazz and punk shows, recitations by Jenkins, and shots of the Los Angeles skyline and oil wells to comment on power and nation in the early years of Ronald Reagan's presidency.

This is a documentary of David Hammons prior to his leaving the Los Angeles arts community. This video covers the artist's creative strategies at that time. It served as both an interview and video performance by David Hammons.

Phat Free begins with several minutes of darkness overlaid with an unidentifiable loud, metallic sound. As the video image is revealed, a man—Hammons himself—appears dressed in a long coat, felt hat, and sneakers, kicking a metal bucket down a deserted city sidewalk late at night. The work was shot in 1995 to document Hammons’s late-night performance and edited into an independent video work four years later. At first seemingly violent, the noise evolves into an almost musical rhythm that is synchronized with the protagonist’s methodical movements. The title elaborates this musical allusion, conjuring both the streetwise lyricism of rap and hip-hop and the improvisational nature of jazz.

A studio visit by David Hammons to John Outterbridge's studio. Recorded by Ulysses Jenkins as Hammons proclaims an arts affliction.

In 2001, David Hammons filmed Ted Joans unfolding the long artwork across the floor of the New York apartment of Robin D. G. Kelley and Diedra Harris-Kelley. Together with the artist Laura Corsiglia, they discuss each drawing and the creative and personal histories of the seemingly endless contributors. The camera follows the piece from fold to fold, emphasizing its physicality, the active process required to engage with it, the impossibility of viewing it in its entirety all at once. The artwork collapses into fragments but links its international participants, folding, unfolding, obscuring, revealing, connecting across great distances. In the end David Hammons adds his own drawing, continuing the long-distance transmission.

A video of David Hammons making his basketball drawings