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DAVID HAMMONS (1943 - ) & BRUCE TALAMON (nd – )
Untitled (Max Roach Album Art)
.
Group of 4 color screenprints, one printed on corrugated cardboard, three printed on wove paper,
1977. Each 13x11 inches, full margins. Each print (except the blue one) is inscribed “Photo/Silkscreen,
BruceTalamon/David Hammons” and their NYC telephone numbers in ink byTalamon on the verso.
Provenance: the estate of Max Roach, NewYork, with a signed and dated “4/6/77” letter written
from BruceTalamon, and the original cardboard box, sent to “Mr. Max Roach” at his Amherst, MA
address. Bruce Talamon gives Roach David Hammons’s Just Above Midtown Gallery West 57th
Street address and phone number as contact as “the other half of this collaboration is in NewYork
now.” Talamon describes how “we are both excited about these pictures, and would like you to
consider them or at least the concept for any graphic work you might need on albums.”
It is not known if any project by Max Roach with this artwork was ever realized. Roach’s music
labels employed a number of artists to design his album covers.Additionally, he has been the subject
of many artists’ portraits, fromWilliam Gottlieb’s photographs of him playing jazz in clubs in the
late 1940s to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting,
Max Roach
, 1984.
David Hammons and Bruce Talamon are closely associated with the vibrant Los Angeles and New
York art scenes in the late 1970s.Almost every David Hammons installation or event at the time was
photographed by his friendTalamon.The exhibition catalogue
Now DigThis:Art & Black Los Angeles
1960-1980
at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, illustrates several of Talamon’s photographs of
Hammons creating body prints in the Just Above Midtown Gallery.
[50,000/75,000]