LOS ANGELES — Upon arriving at the newly remodeled Hammer Museum, I was politely directed from the garage entrance to the doors facing the busy corner of Wilshire and Westwood boulevards. After decades of slightly confused visitors arriving via a bank of generic office building elevators, it’s no wonder the museum is thrilled to welcome people to its airy new lobby, currently adorned with 800 red thread books by artist Chiharu Shiota and a team of UCLA students to create the eye-catching installation “The Network” (2023).
Despite the museum’s location at the busy intersection near the 405, “it’s been an invisible building for all these years,” director Ann Philbin told Hyperallergic. “People walk past [and] they have no idea there is a museum here. And therefore, I think…we’re still kind of a well-kept secret to the general public.
Philbin’s leadership launched more than two decades of renovations by architect Michael Maltzan, beginning in 2000, and a fundraising campaign that has raised $156 million to date. These initiatives culminated in the unveiling of the renowned Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center, complete with a new 5,600 square foot gallery, sculpture terrace and lobby featuring four exhibits. The most recent renovations aimed to make the institution more visible from the street, creating better public awareness of what is now the third largest art collection in Los Angeles after the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA ) and the Getty Institute.
“The museum started out exactly the opposite of how most buildings are designed. Here we started in the middle and worked outwards,” Maltzan said. Hyperallergic. “Now is the time when you can actually go out and say hello to the city with what you’ve done. It’s really a connection to the city that I think is going to be surprising to people. All of a sudden , the museum is present on the most important “main street”, if you will, in Los Angeles.”
The museum has also evolved from the inside out. Its collections and programming have transformed alongside its architecture with the establishment of a leading contemporary art collection and excellent film programming at the Billy Wilder Theatre, which opened in 2006. The museum now houses more than 4,000 contemporary works, some of which are featured in the extensive exhibition Together over time in the main galleries of the Hammer.
When the Hammer opened in 1990, it featured industrial founder Armand Hammer’s collections of European and American paintings and drawings in the modest space next to the Occidental Petroleum building (Hammer was the company’s former president). The collection merged with UCLA in 1994, and the university purchased the Occidental Petroleum Building in 2015, adding 40,000 square feet to the museum and allowing for eventual expansion of ground floor galleries to span the entire the block.
Rita McBride’s laser-based “particles” (2017) are now installed in this section and visible through the windows from the street. It is, at present, the only space the museum is still considering adapting: Philbin explained that McBride wanted to keep the former banking space in its current state for his installation so that it felt “like a corporate ruin”. To that end, the eerie green light and dilapidated floor of McBride provide a fascinating contrast to the tactile, bright red canvas of the Shiota in the shiny new lobby.
Meanwhile, Sanford Biggers’ monumental 25ft-tall ‘Oracle’ (2021) holds court on the corner of Wilshire and Glendon, combining African and European histories in its form and awe-inspiring from every angle. The installation of the statue facing the street is another demonstration of the visibility of the reinvented Hammer for passers-by.
In addition to public access, Hammer spaces have other advantages of varying scales and sizes. “Most museums can’t hand over their big galleries to an emerging artist,” Philbin said. “While we can allow this kind of experimentation and jump off a cliff, take a chance, because space is just one of many small spaces.” For Maltzan, the challenge was to ensure architectural consistency across these varied spaces and 20 years of change “while constantly evolving the way you think about the museum”.
between the museum Made in LA biennale, created in 2012, and its interdisciplinary exhibitions such as the recently closed exhibition Joan Didion: what she means, the Hammer has played a key role in changing Los Angeles’ reputation as a contemporary art hotspot over the past decade. In addition to the evolution of the Hammer, the openings of the Orange County Museum of Art in 2022, the Academy Museum in 2021, and the ongoing major construction of LACMA have all reshaped the city’s cultural landscape. As new institutions arise, they each have to deal with the future evolution of the arts, including calls for the decolonization of institutional structures and changing definitions of what a museum should be “for”.
“Each part [of architecture] was tailored to how the Hammer thought about its future, not its past,” Maltzan said. The basic concept of the hammer, as described by Maltzan, is “the profound idea that museums are not, in fact, distant warehouses of the vicissitudes of what happens in culture, but can follow the rhythm of culture”. With this revamp, the Hammer is certainly keeping pace – and in many ways ahead of the game.
The Hammer Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and admission is free.
