Walking Tall

Artists Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, and Ulysses Jenkins will continue to re-imagine Kiss, first performed in the late 1970s and re-imagined for the October 2011 opening of Hammer’s Now Dig This!. Special guests Baba Alade, Michael Delgado, Ava Hassinger, VinZula Kara, Barbara McCullough, Nobuko Miyamoto, Rudy Perez, Cheryl Banks-Smith, Stephen ‘Breeze’ Smith, David Strother, May Sun, and L. Martina Young will participate in this iteration. Encouraged to “accentuate the positive” and to be “infused with joy,” each guest contributes a chapter in his or her own individual style. A meditation on pride and self-confidence, Walking Tall will culminate in an interactive audience experience. Organized by the Hammer Museum, this performance is guest curated by Naima J. Keith, assistant curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem and curatorial fellow for Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980.

Los Angeles was a key international birthplace of performance art. Engaging the innovative spirit of that period and LA's vibrant contemporary art scene, the Performance and Public Art Festival will transform Southern California over eleven days (January 19-29, 2012) during Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980. Featuring more than 30 major performances and large-scale outdoor projects, the festival will include new commissions, reinventions, and restagings inspired by the radical and trailblazing public and performance works that were created by artists during the Pacific Standard Time era. Performances and projects will be located at institutions and sites throughout Southern California, in close proximity to more than two dozen Pacific Standard Time exhibitions.