David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979

This exhibition at The Drawing Center in New York presents a landmark selection of works from David Hammons's celebrated Body Prints series, made between 1968 and 1979. Using his own body — pressed, rolled, and coated in margarine and powdered pigment — Hammons produced haunting impressions that sit at the intersection of performance, printmaking, and political art.

Created during one of the most turbulent periods in American civil rights history, these works confront race, identity, and the Black body in American society with raw directness. Hammons's process was as conceptually charged as its results: the act of imprinting the body became a form of testimony, transforming the artist himself into both medium and message.

The Body Prints are widely regarded as foundational works in American art of the late twentieth century, and this exhibition — held at The Drawing Center in 2021 — offers a rare opportunity to encounter them together.