This October the Hammer Museum will present Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, a comprehensive exhibition that examines the incredibly vital but often overlooked legacy accorded to the city's African American visual artists. Now Dig This! comprises 140 works from 35 artists that have rarely been shown in a museum setting and includes early pieces by now well-established artists as well as works once considered "lost." The exhibition will be up October 2, 2011-January 8, 2012.
Now Dig This! is curated by Kellie Jones, associate professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Jones’s writings have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and publications including NKA, Artforum, Flash Art, Atlantica, and Third Text. Most recently, she curated Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980 (The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006). Current book projects include, Eye-Minded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke University Press 2011) and Taming the Freeway and Other Acts of Urban HIP-notism: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (forthcoming from The MIT Press).
