Hammer Museum
Westwood
August 1, 2015
Enough digression for now! Time for a blog post which is both about a museum AND located in Southern California. On this visit we took Margaret to the Hammer Museum. We have taken her there several times before, although not since we started keeping this blog. The Hammer has several things to recommend it: admission is free, the permanent collection includes some very nice pieces, and it is relatively close to Margaret’s home in the Valley, although traffic is usually bad on the West Side. We are not big fans of contemporary art, which is the Hammer’s focus, so we only visit there when there are exhibitions of particular interest to us.
Today we saw all three of the featured special exhibitions. The Afghan Carpet Project is displayed in a small gallery on the ground floor and consists of six handmade carpets, all designed by contemporary Los Angeles artists, then handmade by weavers in Afghanistan. That exhibit runs through September 27, 2015, and when it has closed the carpets will be sold and the proceeds given to the nonprofit organization Arzu Studio Hope, working in Afghanistan.
We enjoyed the photography exhibition Perfect Likeness: Photography and Composition, which runs through September 13, 2015. Meredith had seen a review of the exhibition in the Los Angeles Times, Making Photos, Not Taking Them. As the title of the exhibition suggests, the photographs featured are very beautiful and carefully composed, truly works of art in photographic media. Meredith was particularly taken by a large photo of a river landscape. Margaret was struck by a still life featuring a cat statuette and a vase of flowers. Bob liked a camera shop photo staged recently but based on an old snapshot of a camera store in the 1930s. The third special exhibition, Scorched Earth, features paintings and mixed media pieces by Mark Bradford. It runs through September 27, 2015.
We finished our visit with a swing through the permanent collection, which features traditional art, mainly paintings, from the Renaissance through the Impressionist era. Several signature pieces are currently not on exhibit, and a guard said they were on loan to other museums. The galleries have been rearranged so no obvious holes in the collection exist. There were plenty of nice pieces left for us to enjoy, including a large Eakins painting and a small Monet.
Partway through our visit we stopped to have lunch in the museum café. The menu was more extensive than we had recalled, and we all enjoyed our meals. Margaret had a BLT, Bob a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, and Meredith salmon benedict. The café is located in the museum courtyard, and the setting is quite pleasant, shaded by Chinese elms. The menu prices were a little high, but not unusually so for a museum restaurant or for Westwood.
As noted above, museum admission is free. (Their slogan is “free for good.”) On Saturday and Sunday parking costs a flat $3 charge for all day; during the week parking costs $3 for 3 hours with validation by the museum. Wheelchair accessibility is generally good. The elevator is quick and serves all floors. However, doors into galleries are heavy and do not have automatic opening mechanisms. Staff and other patrons assisted us with those doors today.
Margaret finds the car to wheelchair transfers harder than before. She tires easily. We are hoping that physical therapy will help her build strength so she can stand longer and take more steps, and we are trying to encourage her.