Living Materials in Contemporary Art
August 22, 2026, 2pm
Los Angeles CA 90024
United States
On the occasion of the closing weekend of Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials, the Hammer Museum at UCLA presents a closing symposium featuring talks by artists, curators, museum professionals and scholars. The program is co-presented with the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
The symposium will examine the bond between the ontological dimension of the art object and the use of mineral and organic materials emerging from Brown and Indigenous worlds. These conversations will focus on key questions raised by the exhibition, underscoring how the notion of living materials can recast museological practices while challenging the practice of ownership within art collections and questioning established conservation and display protocols.
Artist Rose B. Simpson kicks off the program with her keynote presentation, followed by a panel discussion between artist Carmen Argote; Head of Modern and Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute, Idurre Alonso; Associate Professor of Latinx/Latin American art at UCLA Kency Cornejo; and Fowler Museum director Silvia Forni, moderated by exhibition curator Pablo José Ramírez.
About the exhibition
Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials features twenty-two artists from North, Central, and South America who embrace the unpredictable nature of living materials. These artists use materials such as avocado, cacao, achiote, cochineal, stone, clay, and natural dyes to create large-scale installations, paintings, works on paper, and mixed-media sculpture. Each of these materials is alive—they evolve, decay, drip, crumble, and evaporate. They are rooted in the spirit, memory, and knowledge of Brown and Indigenous worlds. The exhibition considers ideas around materials as records of the living and repositories of cosmic memory, organic decay and transformation.
