LOS ANGELES, CA.- The UCLA Hammer Museum marked the culmination of its two-decades-long project to remake itself inside and out—expanding, renovating, and transforming the building and program together—on Saturday and Sunday, March 25 and 26, 2023, with a weekend of opening celebrations for the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center.
The weekend’s events unveiled the new spaces designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture to elevate the experience and capacities of the museum’s building—named for the Resnicks in recognition of the global philanthropists’ major gift to the Hammer through their foundation—and provide opportunities to enjoy the opening exhibitions, including the largest presentation to date of the Hammer Contemporary Collection. As always, admission to regularly scheduled exhibitions and programs is free.
To begin the celebrations, the Hammer hosted a special members event in the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center on Saturday, March 25, featuring an all-vinyl set by DJ Pee .Wee (Anderson .Paak). On Sunday, March 26, the Hammer opened its new doors to the public, welcoming everyone to explore the museum’s new spaces and inaugural exhibitions. Sunday activities included tours, art-making activities, and more.
Museum Director Ann Philbin said, “We are thrilled to welcome everyone to a reimagined Hammer Museum and the newly named Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center. It’s beyond gratifying to see these new spaces filled with powerful artworks spanning an entire city block of Wilshire Boulevard, inviting the community into the museum. I’m grateful to the generosity and support of Lynda and Stewart Resnick, as well as our board chair Marcy Carsey and so many generous donors to our campaign, which have brought us to this milestone that has been more than twenty years in the making. It’s been a joy to work so closely with Michael Maltzan all these years and to celebrate this moment together.”
Marcy Carsey, Chair of the Hammer’s Board of Directors, said, “The Hammer’s building and program now reflect the vibrancy of the museum both inside and out. On behalf of the entire Board, I share our elation at seeing the Hammer reach this historic milestone.”
"Stewart and I have a long and proud association with the Hammer, and we are thrilled to be part of this next evolution,” said Lynda Resnick, co-owner of The Wonderful Company. “Creative expression and art as a platform for ideas immeasurably benefits our world and is more important today than ever. The Hammer champions art and the artists who challenge us, and brings us the world in a new light with the chance to experience the unexpected.”
The opening of the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center follows the renovation of the museum’s existing galleries, public event spaces, and restaurant; expansion of its offices and other back-of-house spaces; addition of a new gallery and study center for works on paper; and renovation of the beloved Hammer Store. In total, the Hammer has grown by 40,000 square feet while achieving its goals of:
• creating a dramatic presence across a full city block
• increasing gallery space by 60 percent
• providing 20,000 square feet of enhanced community space
• and enabling itself for the first time to showcase works from the collection of more than 50,000 objects while at the same time presenting its renowned temporary exhibitions.
Visitors to the museum on Sunday were among the first to experience major new street-level exhibition spaces designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture, which include an expansive lobby that houses rotating installations of site-specific commissions, a new 5,600-square-foot gallery facing Wilshire Boulevard near Glendon Avenue, and an outdoor sculpture terrace at the corner of Wilshire and Glendon. The new spaces will feature a dramatic installation work by Chiharu Shiota, a large-scale artwork by Rita McBride, and a 25-foot-tall cast bronze sculpture by Sanford Biggers. Within the museum, nearly all of the Hammer’s galleries will be dedicated to showcasing the Hammer’s permanent collection of contemporary art.
THE HAMMER’S TRANSFORMED BUILDING
The project to transform the Hammer Museum’s building culminates in 2023 with the creation of the prominent, street-level main entrance for the museum, and galleries stretching the length of the entire city block. A cylindrical, one-story-high column set into a concave fold in the pavement marks the busy corner of Wilshire and Westwood, directly across from the future site of the Metro Purple Line station. The column supports the edge of a porch that has been carved out of the tower to provide a sheltered gathering place. On one inner side of the porch is a video wall for projecting artworks and information; on the other is the entry to the lobby. Above the entryway is a new, large white-on-black sign rising the full height of the original museum building, boldly identifying the Hammer Museum and the newly named Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center.
The highly transparent glass running along the first floor of the building will also open views into the spacious new lobby, where inside regularly changing installations of wall-size artworks will create what Michael Maltzan considers to be the building’s “true façade.” Ramps, stairs, and a passenger elevator organized around a gleaming, elliptical information desk will lead visitors to the exhibition galleries. At the corner of Glendon and Wilshire, a 900-square-foot sculpture terrace has been added, activating the southeast exterior of the museum. Inside the Wilshire and Glendon corner of the tower is a new 5,600-square-foot gallery for artist projects. At a future date, the Hammer will directly connect this new gallery at the intersection of Wilshire and Glendon to the redesigned museum lobby.
Michael Maltzan said, “Thanks to Ann Philbin and her amazing team, we had a clear vision of what the Hammer should become, from the moment we began designing the master plan for what was then a cloistered, private museum of historic European painting. That clarity sustained us through a process that demanded extraordinary persistence and inventiveness, because we needed to work in phases as we reshaped, reconfigured, opened, and expanded the Hammer. This was truly a case of building the airplane while you were flying it. I can’t think of any other client that would have had the daring and imagination to carry it off.”
The Hammer’s transformation began with a period of institutional and architectural change focused on expanding the museum’s program and opening the original museum building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, taking advantage of the potential for indoor-outdoor space, and creating the Billy Wilder Theater in 2006 as a center for film and other public programs. In 2012 the central courtyard (now known as the Pritzker Family Commons) was transformed into a beautiful and lively gathering place; and in 2015 the now-iconic John V. Tunney Bridge connected the third-floor galleries.
The master plan gained momentum in 2015 with the Hammer’s receipt of a 99-year lease from UCLA for 40,000 square feet in the former Oxy Tower, adjacent to the existing museum building, which led to the complete renovation of the Hammer’s existing galleries (2016); the creation of the Bay-Nimoy Studio (2018), the Annenberg Family Terrace, a reimagined entrance on the museum’s Lindbrook Drive side, and a renovated restaurant (all 2019); the expansion and renovation of back-of-house administration (2021); and the addition of a new works on paper gallery and study center as well as the renovated Hammer Store (2022).
INAUGURAL EXHIBITIONS AND INSTALLATIONS
The suite of exhibitions and installations that will debut as the museum’s transformed building is unveiled is dedicated to the Hammer Contemporary Collection, and demonstrates how the Hammer has grown programmatically as well as physically. A key development at the Hammer since 2005 has been the creation of a world-class collection of contemporary artworks. The assembly of the collection, which has since grown to comprise more than 4,000 artworks, began as a natural continuation of the Hammer’s presentation of contemporary art, most notably the emergence of the Hammer Projects and the invitationals for artists living and working in Los Angeles that would ultimately become the Made in L.A. biennial.
Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection features more than 70 artworks in a range of media. The largest presentation of the Hammer Contemporary Collection in the museum’s history, this exhibition looks at contemporary art through the lens of Los Angeles and will feature works by artists including John Baldessari, Amoako Boafo, Mark Bradford, Huguette Caland, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Noah Davis, Aria Dean, rafa esparza, Simone Forti, Owen Fu, Charles Gaines, Robert Gober, Eva Hesse, Tishan Hsu, Luchita Hurtado, Mike Kelley, Laura Owens, Noah Purifoy, Patssi Valdez, and many others. The presentation will unfold as a series of exhibitions of works by Los Angeles–based and international artists, more than half of which have not been on view at the Hammer since their acquisition.
Complementing Together in Time is Full Burn: Video from the Hammer Contemporary Collection with works presented on a rotating basis every two weeks; and a series of solo presentations starting with Karon Davis and followed by Kaari Upson and Kara Walker. Cruel Youth Diary: Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection comprises works selected from a recent major gift to the Hammer by the Haudenschild family. This presentation focuses on pioneering works from the 1990s and early 2000s by artists including Cao Fei, Weng Fen, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, and Zhu Jia. In June the museum will add Ecstatic: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, which will showcase sculpture and works on paper.
Inaugurating the sculpture terrace at Wilshire Boulevard and Glendon Avenue is Sanford Biggers’s (b. 1970, Los Angeles) Oracle (2021), a 25-foot-tall, 7.64 US ton, cast bronze sculpture, co-presented by Art Production Fund and supported by Marianne Boesky Gallery. This monumental commission is a continuation of Biggers’s Chimera sculptures, a series of figurative sculptures created by combining various African and European masks, busts, and figures that explore historical depictions of the body and their subsequent myths, narratives, perceptions, and power.
The Hammer’s new street-level gallery opens with Particulates (2021), an installation by Rita McBride (b. 1960, Des Moines, Iowa) that is part of the Hammer Contemporary Collection. Inspired by time travel, the principles of light and space, and quantum physics, this monumental yet ethereal sculpture materializes as beams of lasers interact with a mist of water molecules and surfactant compounds. Particulates exchanges gravity, a core element in sculpture, for the potential of infinitely traversable space. The strange beams of light appear as an apparition inside the gallery, as if haunted by the residue of a bank which previously occupied the space. The installation can be experienced in the gallery during museum hours and is also visible at night through the windows on Wilshire Boulevard.
Continuing the Hammer’s long and celebrated history of featuring commissioned works on its lobby wall, Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972, Osaka) is the inaugural artist featured in the Hammer’s redesigned lobby. Her transportive site-specific installation establishes a dialogue with the architecture of the space and immerses the viewer in a meditative environment constructed with hundreds of thousands of the artist’s signature red wool fibers. Titled The Network, the ephemeral piece is one of the few Shiota works whose subject matter is its own formal and poetic language, a performative approach to drawing in three-dimensional space, and reflects on the artists’ career, marked by an unwavering dedication to yarn as a material.
Also on view are two exhibitions that opened in February. Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio is a retrospective exhibition co-organized by the Hammer Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Morgan Library & Museum, in the works on paper gallery adjoining the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, home to one of the most significant collections of works on paper in the United States. The career-spanning presentation is the first museum exhibition in more than half a century dedicated to Riley’s drawings, and the most extensive ever organized.
