If you’re ever near UCLA and need to kill time (or just need some arctic-level air conditioning) the Hammer Museum is free! The museum was founded in 1990 by Armand Hammer with art from his personal collection (pictured), which contains a lot of French paintings from the 1800s.
But Hammer died three weeks after the museum opened, and a few years later UCLA took over museum operations. (UCLA already had Wight Art Gallery and the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts as well as a sculpture garden).
In 1999 a woman named Ann Philbin became director and made the museum great. Her improvements included adding a museum cafe which these days is called Lulu, and it is fancy. It’s one of those places where everything is local, organic, sustainably sourced and definitely not vegan. (The menu uses words like “creme fraiche” and “fig.”) If you’re looking for grab-and-go, you’ve come to the wrong museum. (I might have been looking for grab-and-go.)
The museum exhibits are arranged in two stories surrounding a courtyard, like an outdoor mall where the stores are individual exhibits. I started with “David Medalla: In Conversation with the Cosmos,” which features the work of Filipino artist David Medalla (who passed away in 2020). He did a cool series of machines, like stuff with an actual engine that spun a coil or generated foam. These are studies for a lava machine that he never got to build. (The sign points out that it’d be hard for a museum to display a lava machine.)
The next exhibit was “Refashioning: CFGNY & Wataru Tominaga.” (CFGNY stands for Concept Foreign Garments New York.) CFGNY created this cardboard camera that looks like the one Toyo Miyatake snuck into the Manzanar concentration camp. Once he was released he opened a photo studio in Los Angeles, which his grandson still runs.
The Wataru Tominaga section of the exhibit. “Tominaga strives to establish an alternative value system that defies conventional categorization prevalent within our capitalist society by creating gender-fluid fashion art objects.”
This exhibit is called “Houseguest: Mute Flesh.” Houseguest is a series where an artist gets invited to curate a selection of items from UCLA’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. This edition is by EJ Hill.
And finally I visited “Sum of the Parts: Serial Imagery in Printmaking, 1500 to Now.” (It is crazy how detailed the stuff from the 1500s was.) This is a selection by Henri Matisse from “Jazz,” a collection of paper cutouts he made after being bedridden in 1941.

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