Tag Archives: Hammer Museum

TURNING A CORNER

Leave a reply

Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin announced last Thursday that “the ambitious multi-year project to renovate, expand, and transform the institution has taken a major step forward with the public launch of a $180 million capital campaign. The announcement coincides with a lead gift of $30 million from L.A. philanthropists Lynda Resnick and Stewart Resnick—the largest in the museum’s history. In recognition of this generous gift, the Hammer’s building will be dedicated as the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center…

“The transformation project is helmed by renowned architect Michael Maltzan, a longtime partner in enhancing the museum’s facility. Starting with the renovation of the museum’s exhibition galleries in 2017, the current project will continue in phases through 2020, culminating with a dramatic new presence for the museum on Wilshire Boulevard. The museum will remain free and open to the public throughout construction.”

Full press release: hammer.ucla.edu/Museum_Transformation/announcement

The redesign will pivot the main pedestrian entrance stairway from Wilshire to Westwood Boulevard. Image courtesy of Michael Maltzan Architecture.

Museum Transformation

e329beb6-15bf-4627-8295-614380a436b0

JEFFREY STEWART ON ALAIN LOCKE

Leave a reply

“If I were inventing a religion, I would try to work out some beautifully ritualistic mode of reciprocal confession and make all the conception of punishment and reward psychological and self-inflicted.” — Alain Locke, letter to Countee Cullen, 1923

The life and times of Alain Locke—philosopher, writer, editor, professor, the first African American Rhodes scholar, and “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance—have been told by Jeffrey C. Stewart in his new book THE NEW NEGRO—THE LIFE OF ALAIN LOCKE.

“Unlike many of his colleagues and rivals in the black freedom struggle of the early 20th century, Locke, a trailblazer of the Harlem Renaissance, believed that art and the Great Migration, not political protest, were the keys to black progress. Black Americans would only forge a new and authentic sense of themselves, he argued, by pursuing artistic excellence and insisting on physical mobility.” — Michael P. Jeffries

This week, Stewart joins musician, poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist Carl Hancock Rux for a public discussion about “black genius, cultural pluralism, and the legacy of Locke and his pioneering ideas.”

 

JEFFREY STEWART AND CARL HANCOCK RUX

Wednesday, February 28, at 7:30 pm.

Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los Angeles.

Above: Jeffrey C. Stewart and Catherine Czacki outside the Mansuy house in Giverny, France in 2015 during the Terra Summer Residency.

Below: Winold Reiss, Alain Locke. Image credit: National Portrait Gallery.

LOSING GROUND

Leave a reply

“How do we divest ourselves of the need to make ourselves extraordinary? Now the danger… is we must now be too good. If you’ve been the notion of sin incarnate and you’re now trying to correct that balance, what do you do? You make black people into saints. Neither one is true. Neither one is reality. Both are tracks to dehumanize you.” — Kathleen Collins, at Howard University

Kathleen Collins criminally underseen independent landmark LOSING GROUND (1982) has been resurrected and restored by Milestone Films, and returns to the big screen in Los Angeles in the UCLA Film and Television Archive program Working Girls—American Career Women on Screen.

Nina Collins—the daughter of the late filmmaker—will be on hand to discuss the film. The evening begins at 7:30 pm with the screening of DESK SET, the Tracy-Hepburn comedy.

 

LOSING GROUND (following DESK SET), Saturday, February 24, at 7:30 pm.

BILLY WILDER THEATER, Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los Angeles.

cinema.ucla.edu/losing-ground

cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/losing-ground

cinema.ucla.edu/working-girls

See: vogue.com/kathleen-collins-nina-collins

Scenes from Losing Ground.

Losing Ground

LosingGround-small

 

BRESSON’S BALTHAZAR

Leave a reply

A 35mm print of Robert Bresson’s empathetic masterpiece AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966) will screen this week in Westwood, and philosopher and ethologist Vinciane Despret—author of What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? —will be on hand to discuss the film.

Balthazar is a donkey that we follow throughout his working life with many masters, especially his first owner—Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), the farmer’s daughter—who gives him his name.

“Although the donkey has no way of revealing its thoughts, that doesn’t prevent us from supplying them—quite the contrary; we regard that white-spotted furry face and those big eyes, and we feel sympathy with every experience the donkey undergoes. That is Bresson’s civilizing and even spiritual purpose in most of his films; we must go to the characters, instead of passively letting them come to us.” — Roger Ebert

This screening is part of the UCLA Film and Television Archive program Europe in Four Themes—Animals.

 

AU HASARD BALTHAZAR

Friday, February 23, at 7:30 pm.

Hammer Museum, Billy Wilder Theater

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los Angeles.

Above: Balthazar and Anne Wiazemsky in Au hasard Balthazar.

Below: Wiazemsky.

JOAN DIDION — THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD

Leave a reply

“It occurred to me during the summer of 1988, in California and Atlanta and New Orleans, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and  Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations.” — Joan Didion*

The documentary JOAN DIDION—THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD, directed by Didion’s nephew, actor Griffin Dunne, will screen at the Hammer this week. Following the screening, Dunne will participate in a Q & A.

 

JOAN DIDION—THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD, Tuesday, February 6, at 7:30 pm.

BILLY WILDER THEATER, Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Bouleverd, Westwood, Los Angeles.

hammer.ucla.edu/joan-didion-the-center-will-not-hold/

* Joan Didion, “Insider Baseball,” in Political Fictions (New York: Knopf, 2001), 19.

Joan Didion. Photograph by Julian Wasser. Image credit: Danziger Gallery.

Image result for joan didion

didion