Basketball & Kool-Aid

Basketball & Kool-Aid documents Nahmad Contemporary's 2021 exhibition of the same name, the first in-depth showing of two related bodies of work David Hammons made between 1995 and 2012.

The 128-page hardcover book, published by Nahmad Contemporary, carries text by Ayanna Dozier and Alex Kitnick. For the Basketball drawings, Hammons bounced a basketball, often coated in dirt, across sheets of paper to leave a trail of grey-scale marks; some works incorporate found objects such as a suitcase or a mound of asphalt. For the Kool-Aid works, he applied the powdered drink to paper in bright washes, occasionally adding Japanese script that spells out mixing instructions.

Both series turn cheap, everyday materials into abstraction while keeping their subject in view: basketball as a promised route out of poverty for Black youth, and Kool-Aid as a marker of Black American culture and of the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid." The pairing extends a line running through Hammons' work since the early 1980s, when public sculptures like Higher Goals used an oversized basketball hoop to the same double-edged effect.