Brenna Youngblood Exhibitions (61)

SPACE IS THE PLACE is a Hammer Contemporary Collection exhibition that takes its title from the 1973 studio album and 1974 film by Sun Ra (1914–1993), a Black American experimental jazz composer and musician known for his radical and esoteric views on Black liberation. The selected works in the exhibition consider “space” as a conceptual framework, through the themes of afro-futurism, belonging, placemaking, and the act of taking up space. SPACE IS THE PLACE comprises installations, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and multi-media works by nearly thirty artists. 

These artworks started from a kernel of reality, glimmer of lived experience, or sliver of memory. Like dreams, they combine real and familiar elements but in illogical or uncanny ways. With works from the Museum’s collection supplemented by loans, this exhibition shows artists giving fleeting memories durable form, envisioning a future, and transforming the everyday into the visionary. Spread across the McCormick, Wasserman Family, and Davidson Galleries, and predominantly featuring collection items with a few special loans, the presentation is divided into two sections: landscapes and bodies (mostly human).