Hammons’s Afro Asian Eclipse (or Black China) emphasizes intersections between Afro-Atlantic and Afro-Pacific cultures. The hanging scroll echoes a traditional Japanese scroll painting, but instead of a picture inset within a fabric background, Hammons creates a central panel of wire chicken-coop mesh. This metal grid is interlaced with poured red and pink paint and tufts of hair that the artist collected from the floors of Black barbershops. By enmeshing pigment within geometrically patterned segments of hair, Hammons upends the conventions of painting, sculpture, and textiles all at once. The work’s title nods to jazz musician Duke Ellington’s 1971 album The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse and the possibilities of global cultural identity.

Gallery label from

Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers, November 18, 2023 – April 07, 2024

Medium Human hair and paint on wire mesh with thread and paper mounted on fabric scroll
Dimensions 43 × 16" (109.2 × 40.6 cm)
Credit Gift of the Hudgins Family in honor of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
Object number 1338.2016
Department Painting & Sculpture

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David Hammons

David Hammons

American, born 1943 21 works online

David Hammons once commented that “outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol." For the past 50 years, Hammons has created a vocabulary of symbols from everyday life and messed around with them in the form of prints, drawings, performances, video, found-object sculptures, and paintings.

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