Hammer Museum Launches Digital Archive with ‘Now Dig This!’ Exhibition About Black Artists in LA
Culture Type interviews Cynthia Burlingham from the Hammer Museum about the initiative.
With a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation the Hammer Museum added a project manager for digital archives to its curatorial team in order to create a digital archive of "one of its most dynamic and historically significant exhibitions."
"THE HAMMER MUSEUM has breathed new life into one of its most dynamic and historically significant exhibitions. “Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980” explored a robust period in the city’s history when a pioneering group of African American artists established an influential creative community and produced important works commenting on the state of culture, politics and identity. The exhibition featured 140 works by 36 artists, including Charles Gaines, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Samella Lewis, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and Betye Saar, practitioners motivated in part by the civil rights and Black Power movements, and the passage of federal anti-descrimination legislation.
“Now Dig This!” was first presented five years ago to coincide wth Pacific Standard Time, a collaboration of more than 60 Southern California cultural institutions coming together to “tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a new force in the art world.” Curated by Columbia University Professor Kellie Jones, “Now Dig This!” was organized by the Hammer where it opened in October 2011, traveled to MoMA PS1 in New York in 2012, and concluded at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., in 2013.
A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of its Made in L.A. biennial, the Hammer Museum re-introduced “Now Dig This!” in a new format. With support from a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, the museum haslaunched a digital archive, making available videos of artist talks and panel discussions, artist biographies, images of artworks presented,installation views of the exhibition at the three venues where it appeared, and all eight essays published in the now-out-of-print exhibition catalog(at right), among other material."— Victoria L. Valentine, August 3, 2016
Read the full article at the Culture Type website.