Film Forum will open it’s doors to ‘The Melt Goes On Forever ~ The Art & Times of David Hammons’, a film by Judd Tully and Harold Crooks, on Friday, May 5th.
Not a conventional chronicle of Hammons’s life and work (now 79, he believes “the less they know about me the better”), the film captures his playful, no-bullshit spirit and conceptual integrity, using archival footage and rare interviews, dynamic animation and sound art, and candid accounts by artists (Betye Saar, Suzanne Jackson, Henry Taylor, Lorna Simpson). Hammons’s profound critiques of racial and social inequality illuminate and implicate simultaneously.
“The more he tells the art world to go fuck itself, the more they want him.” – poet Steve Cannon, describing David Hammons, the brilliant, subversive, and elusive art star and provocateur. In the late ‘60s to mid-‘70s, Hammons captivated the art world with his body prints (using his naked body as a printing plate in meditations on African-American existence), and later works including a snowball-selling performance in the East Village and sculptures made of hair collected from Harlem barbers — all the while sharply defying establishment categories and rules of commerce.
It appears that the Friday, May 5th Q&A show at 7:15pm is sold out. However tickets available for other times on the 5th, and dates through May 11th.
Film forum is located at 209 West Houston Street, NYC.
Take a walk by David Hammons permanent installation entitled ‘Day’s End‘ in Hudson River Park.
Taking a look back at David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968-1979 at The Drawing Center in 2021; And in a group exhibition at MoMA entitled Just Above Midtown which was on view through February 18, 2023.