Hammer Museum
The Hammer Museum is an art museum and cultural center known for its artist-centric and progressive array of exhibitions and public programs. It is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur-industrialist Armand Hammer to house his personal art collection, the museum has since expanded its scope. The Hammer Museum hosts over 300 programs throughout the year, from lectures, symposia, and readings to concerts and film screenings. As of June 2025, the museum's collections, exhibitions, and programs are free to all visitors.
Exhibitions
The Hammer opened November 28, 1990, with an exhibition of work by the Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich which originated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and subsequently travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The museum has since presented important single-artist and thematic exhibitions of historical and contemporary art. It has developed an international reputation for reintroducing artists and movements that have often been overlooked in the art historical canon. Notable examples include a 2003 retrospective of Lee Bontecou, co-organized with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield, curated by the artist Robert Gober; and Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, the Hammer Museum's contribution to the Getty's 2011 Pacific Standard Time initiative. The Hammer is dedicated to diversity and inclusion. Of all of the solo exhibitions on view in Los Angeles between January 2008 and December 2012, the Hammer is the only institution to devote 50% of its exhibition programming to female artists. The Hammer also hosts roughly fifteen Hammer Projects each year, offering international and local artists a laboratory-like surrounding to create new and innovative work.Los Angeles Biennial: ''Made in L.A.''
In 2010 the Hammer announced its inaugural biennial devoted exclusively to Los Angeles artists. Though the museum has routinely featured California artists as part of its ongoing exhibition program, the Made in L.A. series has emerged as an important and high-profile platform to showcase the diversity and energy of Los Angeles as an emerging art capitol. Organized by Hammer senior curator Anne Ellegood, Hammer curator Ali Subotnick, LAXART director and chief curator Lauri Firstenberg, LAXART associate director and senior curator Cesar Garcia, and LAXART curator-at-large Malik Gaines, the inaugural Made in L.A. in 2012 featured work by 60 Los Angeles artists in spaces throughout the city including the Hammer Museum itself, LAXART, and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Hammer also sponsored a satellite exhibition, the Venice Beach Biennial on the Venice Boardwalk, between July 13 and 15th of that year.The second iteration of Made in L.A. in 2014 took over the entire space of the museum to feature work by more than 30 different artists and collectives. The 2014 exhibition was organized by Hammer chief curator Connie Butler and independent curator Michael Ned Holte.
The most recent Made in L.A. exhibition, Acts of Living, was organized by curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez and Luce Curatorial Fellow Ashton Cooper, features 39 artists, collectives, and organizations representing a cross-section of Los Angeles.
Collections
The Hammer Museum manages five distinct collections: The Hammer Contemporary Collection; the collection of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts; the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden; the Armand Hammer Collection, and the Armand Hammer Daumier and Contemporaries Collection.Hammer Contemporary Collection
The Hammer Contemporary Collection, inaugurated in 1999, is the museum's collection of modern and contemporary art. The collection includes works on paper, primarily drawings and photographs, as well as paintings, sculpture, and media arts. The Contemporary Collection houses works from artists, including many active in Southern California from 1960 to the present. Hammer Contemporary Collection works are often acquired in tandem with exhibitions presented at the museum, including the Hammer Projects series focusing on the work of emerging artists.The 2009 exhibition Second Nature: The Valentine-Adelson Collection at the Hammer exhibited selections from Dean Valentine and Amy Adelson's gift to the Hammer Contemporary Collection. The gift of fifty sculptures by 29 Los Angeles artists represents a significant milestone in the Hammer's commitment to collecting the works of Southern California artists.
In 2012, the Hammer showcased selections from the Susan and Larry Marx Collection. The exhibition was made possible by a substantial gift from longtime museum supporters Susan and Larry Marx and includes more than 150 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by over 100 international artists from the post-World War II period. The collection includes examples of Abstract Expressionism on canvas and paper by the American artists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston as well as works by contemporary artists including Mark Bradford, Rachel Whiteread, Mary Heilmann, and Mark Grotjahn among others.
Highlights from the contemporary collection include: The Battle of Atlanta: Being the Narrative of a Negress in the Flames of Desire - A Reconstruction by Kara Walker, Untitled by Mark Bradford, Migration by Doug Aitken, Untitled #5 by Lari Pittman, Mirage by Katie Grinnan, Ruby I by Mary Weatherford, Mimus Act I by Mary Kelly.
Notable recent acquisitions to the Hammer Contemporary Collection include Suzanne Lacy's Three Weeks in May, as well as major works by Lisa Anne Auerbach, Fiona Connor, Bruce Conner, Jeremy Deller, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Friedrich Kunath, Tala Madani, Allan McCollum, Robert Overby, Martha Rosler, Sterling Ruby, Allen Ruppersberg, Barbara T. Smith, William Leavitt, and Eric Wesley.
UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum
The UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts is one of the largest collections of works on paper in the country. Housed at the Hammer Museum, the center was established in 1956 after a gift from Fred Grunwald and today houses over 40,000 prints, drawings, photographs, and artists' books. The collection includes works dating from the Renaissance to the present, including European old master prints and drawings, Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and a collection of contemporary photography initiated by UCLA photographer Robert Heinecken.In 1988 the Grunwald Center received a bequest of over 850 landscape drawings and prints from the collection of Los Angeles–based architect Rudolf L. Baumfeld. The Baumfeld Collection includes important examples of European landscapes from the 16th to 20th-centuries and includes pure landscapes, as well as views of architectural ruins and urban scenes. The Eunice and Hal David Collection, bequeathed to the Grunwald Center by lyricist Hal David and his wife Eunice, is a collection of 19th and 20th-century drawings by European and American artists. Selections from the collection were exhibited at the Hammer in 2003. The 2014 exhibition showcased works from the Elisabeth Dean Collection of 19th and 20th-century works on paper. The collection of approximately 900 prints and illustrated books is among the most significant gifts received by the Grunwald Center in recent years.
The Grunwald Center is also home to several important collections of Los Angeles–based contemporary artists. The Grunwald Center's collection features over 1,000 works by Sister Corita Kent, an influential pop printmaker and social justice activist, including rare preparatory studies and sketchbooks. Additionally, the Grunwald maintains an archive of the first twenty years of June Wayne's influential Tamarind Lithography Workshop, offering a rare overview of contemporary print-making in Los Angeles. Jointly acquired by the Grunwald and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Grunwald Center maintains a complete archive of prints by Los Angeles publisher Edition Jacob Samuel which documents the activity of master intaglio print-maker Jacob Samuel. Highlights from the archive were exhibited in the 2010 exhibition Outside the Box: Edition Jacob Samuel, 1988-2010.
A research and education resource, the Grunwald Center study room is available by appointment to faculty, students, and members of the public.
Highlights from the Grunwald's collection include: Melencolia I by Albrecht Dürer, Christ Preaching by Rembrandt van Rijn, Maple trees at Mama, Tekona Shrine and linked Bridge by Utagawa Hiroshige, Les Grands Baigneurs by Paul Cézanne, Le Repas Frugal by Pablo Picasso, and Entropia , by Julie Mehretu.
Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden
The Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden at UCLA was inaugurated in 1967 and dedicated to the eponymous chancellor of the university. Designed by famed landscape architect Ralph Cornell, the garden houses over 70 works of modern and contemporary sculpture in a five-acre, park-like setting. Group tours of the garden can be scheduled through the Hammer's online request form.The 72 object collection comprises works by Deborah Butterfield, Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, Auguste Rodin, and David Smith. A fully illustrated catalogue, including scholarly entries for each artist, was published by in 2007 by the Hammer Museum.
Armand Hammer Collection
The Armand Hammer Collection is a small selection of European and American paintings, drawings, and prints that formed the original impetus for the foundation of the Hammer Museum. Armand Hammer, the founder and namesake of the museum, assembled and refined the collection through decades of involvement in the art market, both as a collector in his own right and as a co-founder of Hammer Galleries in New York City. The focus of the collection is primarily 19th century and early-20th century French impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, though the collection itself spans the 16th through the 20th century.Selections from the collection are on permanent display in the Hammer Museum's third floor galleries. Highlights of the collection include: Juno by Rembrandt van Rijn, The Education of the Virgin by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, El Pelele by Francisco Goya, Salome Dancing before Herod by Gustave Moreau, Dr. Pozzi at Home by John Singer Sargent, Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin by Paul Gauguin, and Hospital at Saint-Remy by Vincent van Gogh.