A History of New Forms

More than any other American artist of his generation, David Hammons has lived and worked in a word-of-mouth tradition—a Homeric, hermetic method of information exchange that tends to confound at least as much as it conveys. Even his most famous work, the 1983 performance that has come to be called Bliz-aard Ball Sale—in which he peddled various-sized snowballs on a blanket in Cooper Square—remains shrouded in hearsay. When did it occur? Probably Sunday, February 13, but no one to this day, besides maybe Hammons himself, can say for sure. Did it in fact happen more than once? How were the snowballs made? How were they priced? The answer depends entirely on the teller and sometimes shifts depending on the time of the telling.

On the occasion of a re-staging of David Hammons’s watershed 2002 exhibition “Concerto in Black and Blue,” on view at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles from February 15 through May 25, 2025, Ursula magazine presents a special section on the artist, including a new essay by Linda Goode Bryant, an oral history and the following poem. The reader should, as the curator Elena Filipovic once wrote of Hammons, proceed with circumspection: “Some of what you read here might, then, be apocryphal.”