David Hammons

(American, born 1943)

David Hammons is a contemporary American artist whose sculptural, print-based, video, and painted work offers a crucial interpretation of African-American art history. By bridging the societal lines between the predominantly white sphere of fine art and the history of oppression, degradation, and cultural slavery of people of color, he critiques and exposes stereotypes within the art world with razor-sharp precision. “The art audience is the worst audience in the world,” the artist remarked in 1986. “It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?” Born in Springfield, IL, in 1943, he studied at the Chouinard Art Institution and the Otis Art Institute, befriending key members of the Conceptual Art movement including Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, and Chris Burden. Since the early 1970s Hammons' work has been widely influential, garnering honors like a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1991, his inclusion in such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and earning him a place among the canon of the 20th- and 21st-centuries’ most important artists. Hammons currently lives and works in New York, NY.