Palm Fronds and Car Parts: Assemblage Art in Los Angeles

The Hammer Museum’s biennial showcases several artists steeped in the scrappy art form, now flourishing in the city.

By Jori Finkel

Chiffon Thomas, 32, takes as his found objects the ornate wood columns retrieved from demolished Colonial and Victorian-style mansions on the East Coast — “the emblems of something oppressive, something that held my family back,” he said, describing the legacy of racial discrimination. “The architecture was a symbol of all this history, a ghost of the history still very present operating in this insidious way.”

Thomas’s largest work at the Hammer will feature a Black figurative bust made mainly from concrete, with split wood columns and stair spindles extending like wings. These wings pin the figure in place.

Thomas mentioned Nari Ward, Lee Bontecou and Noah Purifoy as inspiration, and, like other biennial artists, he has made a pilgrimage to Purifoy’s art park in Joshua Tree, Calif., — an outdoor museum that delivered the unlikely discovery thrills of a junkyard. With that visit in 2021, Thomas realized the importance of using the actual wood pieces instead of casting, even at the risk of using them up.

Purifoy famously made sculptures in the 1960s out of the charred debris from the Watts riots. He was also the founding director of Watts Towers Art Center, a cultural hub at the foot of the Watts Towers that has exhibited important artists like John Outterbridge, Senga Nengudi and Kenzi Shiokava. The subtitle of this year’s biennial, “Acts of Living,” comes from a quote by Purifoy about creativity as a way of life.