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  • Published: 4 March 2025
  • ISBN: 9780262549363
  • Imprint: MIT Press Academic
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 254
  • RRP: $65.00

David Hammons




The first anthology of texts on the luminary contemporary artist David Hammons.

The first anthology of texts on the luminary contemporary artist David Hammons.

David Hammons is a collection of essays on the one of the most important living Black artists of our time, David Hammons (b. 1943). Documenting five decades of visual practice from 1982 to the present, the book features contributions from scholars, artists, and cultural workers, and includes numerous images of the artist and his work that are not widely available. Contributions include essays from cultural critics including Guy Trebay and Greg Tate; artists Coco Fusco and Glenn Ligon; and scholars such as Robert Farris Thompson, Alex Alberro, and Manthia Diawara.

A star of the West Coast Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and the winner of a Prix de Rome prize as well as a MacArthur Fellowship, David Hammons rose to fame in Los Angeles with his body prints, in which he used his entire body as a printing plate. His later work engaged with materials that he found in urban environments—from greasy brown paper bags, discarded hair from barber shops, and empty bottles of cheap wine—which he turned into things of wonder while also commenting on a country’s neglect of its citizens. In this volume, a new generation of scholars, Tobias Wofford, Abbe Schriber, and Sampada Aranke, broaden the theoretical mapping of Hammons’s career and its impact, challenging viewers to imagine, in the words of Aranke, “how to see like Hammons.”

  • Published: 4 March 2025
  • ISBN: 9780262549363
  • Imprint: MIT Press Academic
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 254
  • RRP: $65.00

Praise for David Hammons

Deborah Willis, University Professor and Chair of Photography and Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
- “Kellie Jones [is] a much sought after scholar, prolific writer, and extraordinary curator whose works I have admired for many years. She began her career in the mid-1980s, uncovering and recovering African and African American artists by organizing exhibitions, writing essays, and lecturing on some of the then lesser-known artists. I believe that she was instrumental in introducing to a larger and contemporary public the works of Black artists of the African Diaspora, including some of the most noted artists working today.”

Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University
- “Kellie Jones…has provided a plethora of razor-sharp insights and creative testimonials to the greater arts and scholarly community for years. As this important book makes amber clear, Jones’s astute observations and in-depth analyses of African American art are invaluable resources to contemporary studies and, arguably, equivalent to the notable essays of art history’s earlier, admired critics and chroniclers.”

Both these are taken from blurbs for her first book EyeMinded (2011, Duke UP)