Over the years as I’ve kept coming across David Hammons works, old and new, which hadn’t been publicly known, I try looking again for any info on one of his major public works—which also nobody knew.
In 1979 Hammons was one of a group of artists commissioned to make work for the big new airport under construction in Atlanta. Here is how ATL Airport Art describes it:
The initiative to display artworks at ATL originated in 1979, when the Domestic Terminal was constructed during Maynard Jackson’s first term as Mayor of Atlanta. In 1979-1980, the Airport commissioned and installed large-scale, permanent artworks by Curtis Patterson, David Hammons, Lynda Benglis, Benny Andrews, Sam Gilliam and others. The Airport received its first of two Governor’s Awards for the Arts for this series of commissions, but an ongoing program was not instituted and the artworks were not maintained.
Benny Andrews’ chronology says he made a 95-ft mural, as did 13 other artists. Indeed, here is a 35mm slide showing Benglis’s giant mural. But Patterson’s website includes a large bronze relief. [Two, actually; he made another after the first got remodeled out of place.] And the project has five folders in Gilliam’s archive. But I’ve never been able to find a photo or even a description of Hammons’ work, or news of its status. [Though I think now the Airport Art site makes it pretty clear these early works are gone.]
But then reading Dr. Kellie Jones’ 1986 interview with Hammons again for the Mandela piece, which does still exist in Atlanta, I realized she’d asked him about it. [Of course she did.]
KJ: You did pieces for a while that had dowels with hair and pieces of records on them. Like the piece you did for the Atlanta Airport.
DH: Those pieces were all about making sure the black viewer had a reflection on himself in the work. White viewers have to look at someone else’s culture in those pieces and see very little of themselves in it. Like looking at American Indian art or Egyptian art—you can try to fit yourself in it but it really doesn’t work. And that’s the beauty of looking at art from other cultures, that they’re not mirror reflections of your art. But in this country, if your art doesn’t reflect the status quo, well then you can forget it, financially and otherwise. I’ve always thought artists should concentrate on going against any kind of order, but here in New York, more than anywhere else, I don’t see any of that gut. It’s so hard to live in this city. The rent is so high, your shelter and eating, those necessities are so difficult, that’s what keeps the artist from being that maverick.
So dowels, records, and hair? You mean like the extraordinary sculpture that just turned up at Christie’s this month? Untitled (Flight Fantasy) is from 1978, and is made of spindly bamboo reeds piercing a broken record filled like a taco with unfired Georgia clay. It is on view right now.
This sculpture has been in the same collection since it was made. It’s very domestically scaled, and I am having a hard time imagining how it would scale up for an airport. And I’m having a hard time imagining how something so fugitive and delicate would survive in what soon became the world’s busiest airport. On the other hand, given what we know about the conservation of unfired clay, I’m having an easy time imagining why it’d longer exist.
21 Nov 2024, Lot 7B: David Hammons, Untitled (Flight Fantasy), 1978, est. $2-3m [christies]
Previously, related: David Hammons’ Free Nelson Mandela is in Atlanta, Y’allhttps://greg.org/archive/2024/08/08/what-happens-in-midtown.html