About ‘David Hammons. Concerto in Black and Blue’
David Hammons’ acclaimed work ‘Concerto in Black and Blue’ debuted at Ace Gallery in New York in 2002. Reprised for the first time since its inception, this historic installation will be on view at Hauser & Wirth’s Downtown Los Angeles Arts District complex through 1 June 2025.

About the book ‘David Hammons’ (2025) 
Accompanying ‘Concerto in Black and Blue’ is the post-exhibition catalogue ‘David Hammons,’ which revisits the artist’s 2019 show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. A singular book created entirely under Hammons’ direction, this publication illustrates the most expansive exhibition of this legendary artist’s work to date.

About Darby English 
Darby English teaches modern art and contemporary art and cultural studies at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is ‘Charles Ray: Adam and Eve’ (Gregory R. Miller, 2024).

About Jasper Marsalis 
Jasper Marsalis lives and works in Los Angeles. Working across painting, sculpture, music and text, Jasper Marsalis elaborates a parallel between the space of painting and a performer on stage, both of which entail an experience of being consumed by audiences. Glaring spotlights are depicted throughout his work, obscuring their intended objects and acting as obstacles to vision. The tension of impermeability is mirrored in the sculptures whose surface fractures seem to chisel at opacity. By troubling perception, Marsalis interrogates the ocular centrism of visual art and the associated role of spectacle and access.

About Harryette R. Mullen
Harryette R. Mullen’s books include ‘Regaining Unconsciousness’ (Graywolf, 2025), ‘Her Silver-Tongued Companion’ (Edinburgh University, 2024), ‘Open Leaves’ (Black Sunflowers, 2023), ‘Urban Tumbleweed’ (Graywolf, 2013), ‘Recyclopedia’ (Graywolf, 2006), ‘Sleeping with the Dictionary’ (University of California, 2002) and a collection of essays and interviews, ‘The Cracks Between’ (University of Alabama, 2012). She has received a Stephen Henderson Award, Jackson Poetry Prize, United States Artist Fellowship, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Fleck Fellowship from Banff Centre for the Arts, Katherine Newman Award for Best Essay on Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry. In 2024 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Furious Flower Poetry Center. In 2023 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Kurdish, Greek, Bulgarian, Russian, Hungarian, Kyrgyz and Vietnamese. She teaches American poetry, African American literature and creative writing at UCLA.

About Joe Ray 
Joe Ray is an American artist based in Los Angeles. Born in Louisiana in 1944, Joe Ray grew up in Alexandria, and studied fine art at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1962, where he was one of few black students in a previously segregated college. Ray arrived in Los Angeles, in 1963, at the age of 20; in 1965 he was inducted into the US Army and sent to Viet Nam, two weeks after the Watts Riots. Upon his return, Ray moved to Leimert Park, and committed himself to his art making. He first showed his artwork in the 1969 4th Annual Watts Summer Festival Art Exhibition. 

His work has moved between abstraction and representation and mediums that include painting, sculpture, performance art and photography. Ray began his career as a painter in Alexandria, Louisiana and arrived in Los Angeles in 1963. He showed early work in the 1969 4th Annual Watts Summer Festival Art Exhibition. Ray quickly received recognition through group exhibitions at SFMOMA, Oakland Museum of California, Long Beach Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (in 24 Young Los Angeles Artists,1971; and 10 Years of Contemporary Art Council Acquisitions,1973). After receiving a Young Talent Award from LACMA in 1970, he enrolled in the first class at the new California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with John Baldessari, Allan Kaprow and Nam June Paik.  At CalArts, he experimented with performance, photography and video art and graduated with a BFA in their inaugural class of 1973.

Joe Ray has belonged to several notable art communities in L.A., including the Light and Space movement (he also assisted artist Larry Bell in Venice). He was then a founding member of the influential 1970s African American collective, Studio Z, with artists such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassenger, and Houston Conwill. Between 1978 and 1980, he was one of fifteen original members of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Los Angeles Artists Advisory Council, alongside Vija Celmins and Robert Irwin. 

Ray has exhibited at the MOCA, LACMA, SFMOMA, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, (CAMH), the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans (CACNO), and the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, among others. His artwork is in the permanent collections of LACMA, The Eli and Edyth Broad Foundation, The AÏSHTI Foundation, and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art.  He lives and works in Los Angeles.  His assemblage-painting, "US," 1993,  is currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where  it is installed as part of the Modern Art permanent collection. His work was included in Made In California: Art, Image and Identity (1900 - 2000), LACMA; and was notably included in L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints (2007) at Tilton Gallery (NY) and Roberts & Tilton (LA). Joe Ray received a 50-year survey, Complexion Constellation, at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in 2017. 

About Fiona Connor 
Fiona Connor (b. 1981, Auckland, New Zealand) completed her bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the University of Auckland and received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2011. Connor’s practice exists at the intersection of architecture, sculpture and installation. By re-contextualizing objects and structures through painstakingly crafted replicas, Connor challenges viewer’s preconceived notions of how art should be experienced. Connor thereby often approaches the gallery or museum as a subject matter itself, exploring what she has referred to as a ‘phenomenological relationship with architecture’. On the occasion of the Made in L.A. 2012 Biennial, for example, Connor replicated the first few steps of the marble stairway in the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. As she has stated, “I may not know anything about you. But what we have in common is this room. And what everyone in this room has in common is this room.” 

In her last exhibition at 1301PE, ‘Community Notice Boards'; the artist re-created a cross section of bulletin boards sourced from public spaces throughout the city - meticulously screenprinting or UV printing the faded flyers and scrappy ephemera on aluminum sheets rather than photocopying them on paper. Frozen at the moment Connor turned the notice boards into art, the works present micro-histories of communities between 2014 and 2015. Documenting the obsolescence of the bulletin board, these works address the influence of Internet technologies on new modes of communication.

Connor's work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions including, amongst others, Made in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California (2014 and 2012); the 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); LAXART, Los Angeles, California (2011); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia (2010). Connor completed her MFA at CalArts and is a 2011 recipient of the Chartwell Trust Award for Patronage and a 2010 finalist for the Walters Prize.