Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Last year I attended a talk between a visual artist and a film professor held at a nonprofit in Brooklyn. The ostensible topic meant to be discussed escapes me because the two middle-aged men knew each other well, and the evening’s structure became loose. Onstage, they riffed about their favorite movies and exhibitions, welcoming input from the audience. A younger academic obtained the microphone. He would go on to document the evening in detail and wanted to ask the two dons of art and cinema something serious. If they had to say, which medium had most affected their intellectual growth overall? “Music,” both replied simultaneously
A new show at the Hammer Museum, “Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal,” seeks to probe her music’s profound effect on culture by telling the story of the jazz musician with the help of nineteen American artists, including Steven Ellison (aka Flying Lotus), Star Feliz, Jasper Marsalis, Cauleen Smith, Martine Syms and more. Among them is Rashid Johnson, who moonlights as a lounge singer these days. Curated by Erin Christovale, the exhibition creates a rich constellation of music-adjacent works to twinkle in the sky alongside Coltrane’s cool blue world.
Coltrane’s gravity affects everything. I’d encountered Bethany Collins’ The Battle Hymn of the Republic (2024) before. This largely conceptual piece offers Civil War sheet music stained by violent-seeming charcoal and graphite. The musical bars are bent into a circle, for the battle was never ended and seemingly never will be. In this exhibition, however, it’s been turned cosmic. The specks are bursts of creativity, and the work becomes about the nature of performance, especially as it’s been reproduced in multiples.
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Marsalis’s paintings receive a similar aura from the association with Coltrane. We begin at Event 3 (2020), in which red lips and big teeth shed tears, or sweat, before a pair of microphones, all of this blown up so massive that they become almost abstracted. The rough style allowed you before to consider this painting as a meditation on the nature of artmaking and fame, if it was about anything at all, but now it feels intensely psychedelic. The trip has still not ended by Event 4 (2020) or even Event 40 (2023), both of which are included in this show. Nikita Gale explores similar territories with her sculptures in which rocks sit on a keyboard playing music, though everything about these shaggy sound pieces is controlled.
Mixed with these bombastic recent works are offerings from Coltrane’s archive, which are not boring. There’s her trip to Japan in 1966 with John. “STAY OR WAKE UP FOR MEDITATIONS & MUSIC ON ‘ETERNITY’S PILLAR,’” advertises one flier for her television show, on every Sunday after midnight on channel 11. Her spirituality comes to the forefront in these parts, but there isn’t a rupture with the contemporary, for it was this spirituality that fueled her impact. Excerpted in the catalogue, Franya J. Berkman writes that Coltrane’s “artistic originality” in some of her albums “had to be related to the ways in which her mystical experiences had been validated by her guru and her experiences in India. In trying to express the absolute—in the sense of Brahman as unbounded, all-encompassing, and inclusive—she was moved to reach beyond the musical boundaries of the jazz genre and fully explore other traditions and styles.” These days, contemporary art is a great partner for improvisation.
“Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal” is on view at the Hammer Museum through May 4, 2025.
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