L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints

L.A. Object offers a historical overview of the Los Angeles assemblage movement of the 1960s and 70s. It focuses on works by primarily African-American artists often omitted from mainstream gallery and museum historical exhibitions who were working during the civil rights movement, the 1965 Watts riots and the era's general social and cultural upheaval: Ed Bereal, Wallace Berman, Nathaniel Bustion, Alonzo Davis, Dale Brockman Davis, Charles Dickson, Mel Edwards, David Hammons, Daniel La Rue Johnson, Ed Kienholz, Ron Miyashiro, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Joe Ray, Betye Saar, Kenzi Shiokava and Timothy Washington. Central to this book are the unique body prints of David Hammons--ironic, often political commentaries relevant to the African-American experience that are presented for the first time within the context from which they arose. Also included are photographic contributions by Bruce Talamon and Harry Drinkwater.

Review :
"This compelling book about the city's Black Arts Movemnt fills an astonishing gap" L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints is the most thorough examination to date of Hammons's early work and features installation shots, ephemera, and many never-before-published photographs of Hammons in the studio….It's an incredibly impressive book… A sprawling and ambitious book, this title examines the work of David Hammons, Noah Purifoy, and other black Los Angeles-based artists who worked with found objects in the 1960s and 1970s. Although these artists have been largely written out of received art historical narratives on the basis both of their ethnicity and their geography, this book makes a forceful case for their importance. "…L.A.'s long-neglected inner-city-based assemblage movement of the '60s and '70s finally gets its hefty-hardcover due in L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints. The 424-page volume charts the primarily African-American scene that gained steam following the 1965 Watts Riots-or Rebellion, as some prefer to call it-when the big-league likes of David Hammons, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar and Kienholz created lasting works out of the era's defining racial tension and urban desolation." The book is a beauty... There is, throughout Ms. Jones’s essay and the book as a whole, voluminous documentation of work by major artists who still rarely figure in most histories of American postwar art, like Betye Saar, who made intricate figurative drawings on covered glass windows; Senga Nengundi, who was conjuring unusual forms from sand and pantyhose before Ernesto Neto was even a teenager; and John Outterbridge, whose multifarious assemblages took on a gamut of styles. Also here are John Riddle, George Herms, Greg Pitts, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Joe Ray and Timothy Washington, to name a few more.