A return visit to the Hammer Museum on Thursday

I went to the Hammer and found many new works by several artists that are now on view.  The art you see as you walk up the stairs is by Maya Hayuk.  Her large abstract murals greet you as you enter the museum with their many bright colors drawn in straight angles on top of one another.  To some they may bring the feeling of anxiety...to me they make me feel joy.  What do you think?

Maya Hayuk

Maya Hayuk was born in Baltimore in 1969.  She has studied at Massachusetts Collage of Art and Design, University of Odessa, Ukraine, and at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine.  She lives in Brooklyn.

James Welling has created photographs for more than 35 years "operating in the hybrid ground between painting and sculpture and traditional photography."  He is a postmodern artist and studied at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.  He was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut.  Here are a couple of his works shown at the retrospective of his creativity.

The second one is a creation of dried flowers he found in a family book.  He laided them on a platform and then shined colored lights over them making them come alive and taking a photo.  The first one was created by cutting slices of paper of different sizes, dropping them on a platform and shining colored lights on them.  These creative photos are beautiful to see.

The next artist featured at the Hammer is Forrest Bess.  He lived from 1911-1977.  This is the first museum retrospective devoted to Bess in more than 20 years.  It is called "Seeing Things Invisible."  The program refers to the "significant recognition and painful isolation during his life."  He was born in Bay City, Texas and educated at the University of Texas at Austin.  After a brief period in the army where he suffered a slight breakdown related to a head injury, he moved to a small trailer isolated near a river where he began to paint.  He believed that becoming a hermaphrodite was the key to immortality.  In 1960, he operated on himself to become a pseudo-hermaphrodite.  He died in a nursing home with a long battle of alcoholism.  According to his wishes, his art is shown with pictures and explanation of his theory and surgery.

Below are photos of some of his work.

Next, there is a small walkthrough exhibit of the works of Mark Leckey.  This includes a video of a man playing a drum.  This London-based artist grew up in the north of England.  This exhibit is entitled "On Pleasure Bent."  The program states that this exhibit is an attempt to make sense of Leckey's own desires and pleasures and their imbrications with technology.  Above and below are two of his photos.  These are from videos.  In the second the camera focuses on the details of the drum and then moves to the drummer.

The final exhibit is a movie of a puppet show acting out the writings of a Lebanese writer, Amin Maalouf's "The Crusades through Arab Eyes" created by Egyptian artist, Wael Shawky.  "The artist attempts to present this revisionist narrative from a distanced perspective, carefully avoiding the representation of any singular point of view and instead offering viewers a completely interwoven recollection inspired by the voices that are so offend silenced in the production of histories."  Three films make up "Cabaret Crusades:"  "The Horror Show File" (2010), "The Path to Cairo" (2012, and "The Secrets of Karbala" (in production).  The first part is being shown at the Hammer. 

Shawky was able to borrow more than 120 two-hundred-year-old marionettes from the Lupi collection in Turin, Italy.  The artist made period-specific costumes for the marionettes, built intricate sets, created a score, and wrote a script in Arabic that narrrates these years of conflict.  The marionettes molded with ceramic heads and hands take on the various roles of historical figures and every day people 

Wael Shawky was born in 1971 in Alexandria, Egypt where he lives and works today.  He studied at the University of Alexandria and the University of Pennsylvania.