Living Art on Display: How the Hammer Museum Embraces Change in "Several Eternities in a Day" Exhibition

On a recent afternoon at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, a visitor leaned over a low barrier to inspect a gray boulder flecked with candle wax and the collapsing remains of fruit. The air in the gallery carried a faint mix of soil, incense and something sweet turning sour.

A security guard stepped closer, not to stop the visitor, but to reassure them.

“It’s supposed to look like that,” the guard said. “It’s part of the work.”

The stone is one of many in a room-size installation by Guatemalan artist Edgar Calel in “Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials,” a major exhibition that opened to the public Sunday at the Hammer Museum at UCLA. The show brings together 22 artists from across the Americas whose work is made with, or conceptually anchored in, materials that are very much alive — and visibly changing.

Running through Aug. 23, the exhibition asks a fundamental question of a museum built to preserve objects: What happens when art is designed to drip, crack, rot and be ritually tended in full public view?

A show built to change

Curated by Guatemalan curator and theorist Pablo José Ramírez with curatorial assistant Jessi DiTillio, “Several Eternities in a Day” is organized in three “acts” rather than traditional galleries.

The first, “Breathing, Bleeding, Crumbling Form,” centers large-scale installations in organic and mineral materials. Calel’s boulder piece bears the traces of a Maya-Kaqchikel ceremony. Offerings of fruit, candles and other elements will be refreshed over the course of the four-and-a-half-month run, with visible residue accumulating on the stones and floor.

Nearby, Los Angeles-based artist Jackie Amézquita has built monumental rammed-earth walls using volcanic rock, soil, turmeric, cacao and achiote. The structure is intended to hold, but not to remain pristine: fine dust falls at its base, and hairline cracks are already beginning to appear.

Carmen Argote contributes a series of paintings made by finger-painting avocado onto paper dyed with cochineal. The avocado’s green surface will oxidize and discolor in the weeks ahead, a process the Hammer describes in its press materials as part of the work rather than a flaw.

In the same act, Salvadoran-born artist Guadalupe Maravilla presents one of his “Disease Throwers,” elaborately assembled sound sculptures that incorporate abalone shells, dried loofah plants, cotton, selenite and steel gongs. Maravilla, a cancer survivor who migrated to the United States as an unaccompanied child, uses these sculptures in sound bath–style healing ceremonies. On opening day, he led two such one-hour sessions in the museum’s courtyard, inviting visitors to sit or lie on the ground as gongs and chimes reverberated through the space.

The second act, “Cosmic Abstraction and Communal Form,” turns to works on paper, painting and video that connect natural dyes and supports to broader cosmologies. Large-scale landscapes by Esteban Cabeza de Baca and Gustavo Caboco are painted with plant-based pigments on natural-fiber supports. A detailed painting by Peruvian artist Santiago Yahuarcani, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is executed on dried tree bark. The imagery draws from Huitoto cosmology in the Peruvian Amazon, linking environmental change to Indigenous storytelling.

In a darkened gallery, an HD video by Sky Hopinka, a filmmaker and artist from the Ho-Chunk Nation and Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, unspools like a moving landscape painting. Land and water flicker between recognizable and abstracted forms, accompanied by an ambient soundscape.

The final act, “Clay and the Manifestation of Form,” gathers ceramic and clay-based works that foreground fire, water and earth. Fourteen ceramic figures by Rose B. Simpson, an artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, stand in formation, their surfaces bearing handprints, cuts and scars. Nearby, an enormous ceramic sculpture by Caddo Nation artist Raven Halfmoon looms over visitors, its scale pushing the limits of what can be fired and safely transported.

Historic works by Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo anchor the section, bridging pre-Hispanic clay traditions and contemporary practice. Two large adobe ovens by Argentine artist Gabriel Chaile, made in New York in 2025 and brought to Los Angeles, further blur domestic and sculptural forms.

Threading through all three acts is a new, multi-part sound work by Pulitzer Prize-winning Diné composer and artist Raven Chacon. The piece, commissioned by the Hammer, comprises three distinct soundscapes embedded in the exhibition and a culminating sound installation in the final gallery, subtly shaping how visitors move and listen.

Brownness, spirituality and “living materials”

The Hammer describes the exhibition as an exploration of “the intertwined relationship between living materials and contemporary art” and of materials as “records of the living” and “repositories of cosmic memory.”

Many of the artists in the show come from Indigenous communities or identify with what Ramírez and the museum call “Brown worlds” — contexts in which stones, clays, plants and sounds are understood as active participants rather than inert stuff.

In early grant descriptions, the project carried a working title: “Several Eternities in a Day: Brownness and the Spiritual Turn in Art.” The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which provided funding alongside the Teiger Foundation, said the exhibition would bring together Latinx, Mestizo and Indigenous artists who “engage ancestral spiritual traditions in contemporary art.”

The final public title emphasizes “Form in the Age of Living Materials,” but the underlying focus remains. Roughly half the artists identify as Indigenous, including Calel, Simpson, Chacon, Hopinka, Yahuarcani and the late Yankton Dakota artist Mary Sully. Others trace their practices to Latin American or Brown urban contexts, such as Argote and Amézquita in Los Angeles.

Four historical figures provide context. A painting by Guatemalan modernist Carlos Mérida nods to Mayan traditions. Films by Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta document her 1970s and 1980s “Silueta” works, in which she used her own body to shape temporary forms in soil, flowers, blood, fire and water. Sully’s “Personality Prints,” colored-pencil triptychs that merge Native design with geometric abstraction, are presented as an alternative lineage to European modernism. Toledo’s clay works connect the final act to long-standing Oaxacan ceramic traditions.

Hammer director Zoë Ryan, who took over the museum’s leadership in January 2025, called the project “an ambitious and groundbreaking exhibition” in a February news release. She said it “challenges us to think expansively about how we present and preserve objects and the knowledge they hold.”

Conservation in a changing gallery

That challenge is not only conceptual. It is practical.

Museums are built on the premise of stabilizing objects: controlling humidity, blocking light, keeping pests away. In “Several Eternities in a Day,” organic components — fruits, plant dyes, soil, loofah, cotton — are expected to change over time.

For works such as Calel’s installation, that change is part of the piece. The artist’s practice, rooted in Maya-Kaqchikel cosmovision, often involves daily or periodic renewal of offerings. For Maravilla, the “Disease Throwers” are activated through live sound ceremonies. Argote’s avocado pigment is intended to oxidize.

Hammer staff members have worked with artists to determine what counts as acceptable transformation and when intervention is necessary, according to the museum’s press materials. That includes practical questions: how often to replace perishable offerings, how to manage air quality and insect risks, and how to document the work as it evolves.

The show also expands the role of time-based documentation. High-resolution photographs and video, as well as detailed instructions from artists about materials and processes, are expected to form part of the museum’s conservation record if any of the works enter its permanent collection.

Environmental and political stakes

The exhibition arrives amid mounting public concern over climate change, environmental justice and inequities in land and water access — issues several of the artists address directly.

Yahuarcani’s bark-cloth painting speaks to Amazonian deforestation. Maravilla has linked his healing practice to the physical and psychological effects of war, migration and illness. The rammed earth and adobe structures by Amézquita and Chaile invoke traditional, low-carbon building methods.

A related program on April 14, titled “Water for Life,” extends those concerns beyond the galleries. The Hammer will screen the documentary “Water For Life,” which follows environmental leaders Berta Cáceres in Honduras, Francisco Piñeda in El Salvador and Alberto Curamil in Chile as they oppose dams, mining and agribusiness projects that threaten local water sources. After the film, anthropologist Jessica Cattelino of UCLA will moderate a discussion with Teri Red Owl, executive director of the Owens Valley Indian Water Commission and a member of the Bishop Paiute Tribe, and Tongva water protector AnMarie Mendoza, drawing connections between Latin American struggles and Native-led water justice efforts in California.

The Teiger Foundation, whose recent grantmaking has emphasized climate-conscious projects, identified “Several Eternities in a Day” as an example of curatorial work that engages “non-colonial aesthetics and climate-conscious practice.”

The Hammer, which offers free admission to all exhibitions and programs, positions such events as part of a broader civic role. The museum hosts roughly 300 public programs annually, including talks, performances and screenings.

A test for the museum — and for visitors

“Several Eternities in a Day” has quickly been marked as a standout in Los Angeles’ spring arts calendar. The Los Angeles Times included it in a list of the season’s most anticipated cultural events, noting that visitors “won’t find typical canvases, paint or prints,” but instead “dripping, changing, sometimes rotting” materials rooted in Indigenous practices. Design magazine Wallpaper described the show as “groundbreaking,” citing its focus on Indigenous and Brown artists and living materials such as cacao, bark and avocado.

For the Hammer, the exhibition represents a convergence of institutional priorities: supporting experimental curatorial work, centering underrepresented artists and addressing environmental and social issues, while navigating the practical realities of a museum space.

By late August, the galleries will look different from opening weekend. Earthen walls will bear more cracks. Avocado pigments will have darkened. New layers of wax will have pooled on Calel’s stones. The visible changes will mark the passage of time, but also the museum’s willingness to let art live — and age — in public.

The show’s title comes from Chilean poet Nicanor Parra’s 1966 poem “Cronos,” which refers to the idea of “several eternities in a day.” In Westwood this spring and summer, those eternities unfold in slowly wilting offerings, in sound waves passing through crowds, and in the quiet adjustments of a museum learning how to care for works that refuse to stay still.