Curated by James Elaine, Aimee Chang, and Christopher Miles

As LA MoCA steadily pursues its excavation of mid-twentieth-century art, the job of examining the emerging generation has fallen to the Hammer Museum. The institution’s third recent survey to focus on young artists, “THING” is both medium and location specific. Sculpture in LA is more a combinatory matrix than a discrete medium, and this is no doubt what the curators had in mind when they grouped Rodney McMillian’s funk assemblage with the hallucinatory realism of Matt Johnson, and Taft Green’s abstractions of exchange systems with Mindy Shapero’s meditations on the ineffable. Three curators, twenty artists, forty-five sculptures, and a fully illustrated catalogue—this show should run the gamut.

— Jan Tumlir