Out of the Ordinary: Uncommon Materials, Marks, and Matrices

Many artists have poured blood, sweat and tears – and other unusual substances – into their work. An exhibition at the Hammer Museum honours the resourcefulness of artists who are willing to draw on all kinds of material, bodily and not, to express their ideas in drawings and prints (21 December–6 April 2025). Drawing largely on the collection of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA, the exhibition surveys the many reasons artists have turned to unconventional materials: playfulness, the compulsion to push formal boundaries, the desire to make political statements in very personal ways. On display are works including Rubén Ortiz-Torres’s 4th of July BBQ Flag (2017), a lithograph of the American flag made by imprinting the ashes of said flag on to cotton paper, and Umar Rashid’s Map of North America (with some glaring omissions) (2022), created using ink, coffee and tea.

Find out more from the Hammer Museum’s website.
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(I love Virginia…) (1996), Edward Colver, from the series The Book of Lies. UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. © Edward Colver

4th of July BBQ Flag (2017) by Rubén Ortiz-Torres, published by El Nopal Press. UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. © Rubén Ortiz-Torres

Map of North America (with some glaring omissions). Or, Welcome to the Terrordome. The byproduct of an irrational fear of a red, black, brown, and green planet. (2022), Umar Rashid. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Sai Tripathi; courtesy the artist and Blum Gallery; © the artist