Art and Ecology: ‘Several Eternities in a Day’ at Hammer Museum
By Darren Smith, Arts Reporter
April 5, 2026
LOS ANGELES — The Hammer Museum at UCLA opened its spring season today with “Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials,” a group exhibition that brings together 22 artists from across the Americas to examine how organic, mutable substances — soil, clay, cacao, avocado, cochineal and stone — function as active collaborators in contemporary practice.
Curated by Pablo José Ramírez with assistant Jessi DiTillio, the show opened to the public on April 5 and runs through August 23, 2026. It coincides with other new Hammer presentations including “SPACE IS THE PLACE: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection” and Hammer Projects: Mike Cloud, creating a rich spring dialogue around identity, futurity and materiality.
The exhibition challenges conventional notions of static form. Materials here are not passive supports but living entities that decay, grow, record memory and carry ancestral knowledge. Large-scale installations, paintings, sculptures, video and sound works invite multisensory engagement — visitors may smell fermenting cacao, touch earth mounds or listen to ceremonial soundscapes. The title evokes multiple overlapping temporalities: ancestral time, ecological cycles and the fleeting present.
Standout works include Edgar Calel’s installations that incorporate Guatemalan Maya traditions, where painted stones and ritual elements bridge the cosmic and the everyday. Other participating artists draw on Brown and Indigenous perspectives, using perishable media to question permanence in the art market and museum context.
“These materials are not just mediums — they are carriers of stories, resistance and regeneration,” said curator Pablo José Ramírez in a statement provided by the museum. “By centering practices rooted in living systems, the exhibition proposes a different relationship to form, one that honors decay as much as creation.”
The show arrives at a moment when contemporary art increasingly intersects with ecology, decolonial thought and new materialisms. In a market often driven by durable objects and digital assets, “Several Eternities in a Day” highlights artists who embrace ephemerality and cultural specificity. It also resonates with broader conversations around sustainability and the body as a site of knowledge — themes that echo in body art practices where skin, modification and ritual mark time and identity.
Opening day programs on April 5 included artist talks with Edgar Calel and others, plus sound ceremonies, underscoring the exhibition’s ceremonial dimension. The Hammer’s spring lineup as a whole signals continued institutional investment in diverse voices and experimental forms, including afro-futurist selections in “SPACE IS THE PLACE.”
While the exhibition does not directly feature digital art or NFTs, its emphasis on mutable, living processes offers a compelling counterpoint to generative and blockchain-based practices that simulate or tokenize ephemerality. At the intersection of contemporary art and embodied experience, it invites reflection on how artists across media treat the material world — and the human body within it — as active, evolving canvases.
The Hammer Museum remains free and open to the public, with additional programming throughout the run.
Darren Smith is an Arts Reporter at Art Chain News covering contemporary art, digital art and NFTs, body art, and the intersections between these fields.
This article is based on exhibition statements, direct reporting, and institutional analysis.
