A Walker in the City

I hadn’t talked to him about his plans for that show. I had no idea what he was up to. I don’t even think the gallery knew. I was as shocked and bowled over as anyone else in the space. There was nothing for the gallery to sell, no way to turn the art into money. I think it was really the apex of David’s genius, a kind of clarity of purpose that he had been working toward for many years. The show was about the art that you made in the space yourself. You came to see something and ended up being aware mostly of yourself, in a way that he orchestrated.

He allowed me to be inside for the opening, to make a short film of what happened inside. And what people didn’t know is that David was actually in there himself that night. I only knew where he was because I had a microphone on him. But he was otherwise totally invisible, moving around among everyone else, watching what they did and what they made, present and at the same time absent.

When we talk about visual art, we tend to talk about it in terms of our connection to it. It tells us a story, visually, even in the most abstract work, as far as I’m concerned. “Why is that purple against that green? Why am I drawn to this canvas, to that sculpture?” What David created in that show was a kind of embodied silence that was really magisterial, a silence that allowed you to hear yourself and others, that took you to a new place of seeing that was both visual and internal.

When David moved to New York from Los Angeles in 1974, I was working at the Studio Museum as director of education and the artist in residency program. Since he was new to the city, he was trying to learn a lot of things quickly. He would come up to Harlem and we would go on long walks. I lived on the Upper West Side, and so there were a lot of times we walked around my neighborhood, too, which I knew well and could talk to him about. Sometimes, I’d want to take the subway to get where he said we we’re going, because it was a long way. And he’d usually go, “Ah, let’s just walk.” He began to focus on specific detritus on the streets of New York, as he had in Los Angeles—greasy bags that he’d take out of garbage cans, chicken bones from takeout containers lying on the sidewalk, the hair on the floor of barbershops. He started to know where he wanted to be, wanted to walk. He’d say, “Linda, meet me down at so-and-so street.” Or, “Meet me on this corner.” Or, “Let’s have dinner over here.” He wasn’t silent when we were walking. But when I’d say something it would usually take me a paragraph, and David would say as much in a word. What you come to realize is all of the things that are around you that you’re oblivious to because you’re busy running your mouth or just not paying enough attention to your environment.

When he had gained enough of a compass between Harlem and the Upper West Side and down into Midtown, he started walking around the Lower East Side and the East Village a lot. For many years, I’d always meet him somewhere downtown. He had discovered his folks on the sidewalks there, a lot of them the gregarious guys who would scavenge things from the street, from the trash, and sell them on blankets, which was a big influence for David’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale in 1983, when he sold snowballs in various sizes from a blanket in front of Cooper Union. All of those blanket guys knew David because he spent so much time around them and was just this silent man, unobtrusive. His walks, I could see, became a more and more multifaceted way for him to observe, study, come across inspiration from anywhere.

I remember a period of years when teenagers, particularly Black teenagers, weren’t tying their sneakers or were sometimes even tying the laces of one shoe to the other. It was a style and David was just fascinated by it. He would stare. I mean, he would sometimes just stand and stare and I’d stare with him. He was examining it, like: “Whoa, the foot comes out of the shoe. How is that affecting the walk?” I am saying this out loud, of course, but he never said it out loud. Probably the performance, or intervention, or however you would describe it, that he did in 1981 with Richard Serra’s T.W.U. sculpture in TriBeCa, when he tossed pairs of tennis shoes, with their laces tied together, over the top lip of the sculpture, making a piece of his own called Shoe Tree, came indirectly from his fascination with the way shoes were being worn. That was the most brilliant use of that sculpture, by the way. It made it look like a part of the city and not like an interloper that had nothing to do with its surroundings or people. For me, as a walking partner over the years, David’s walks count among his most amazing works. And I think he does see them not only as preparation or ways to find material but as a part of the work itself, along with so many ephemeral things he’s done on the streets, things that maybe only he or a few other people around him ever knew about. On his walks, David pushes beyond the merely observant, even the acutely observant, into something much more profound.

There were times when he would do some things that were so extraordinary it was difficult to process them. For example, for a long time, he would put on a tall Cat in the Hat hat and a mask and go stand somewhere on the sidewalk, as people walked past him. He would just be in the crowd and stand still—for hours. And I really mean hours. And somehow people didn’t even see him, which isn’t something I’m saying as an exaggeration. It was as if he wasn’t there. People just walked right by him without stopping or even glancing at him. Sometimes, when I was just walking around a neighborhood where I knew he spent time, I’d really tune myself into the surroundings, thinking to myself: “David might be down here and I might walk right past him.” His stamina when he was doing it was just amazing. He was soaking up the world passing by him as an unobserved observer. He saw things from different angles than you’re otherwise able to.

I began to notice that he was really good at just being invisible, which sounds like a joke but it’s not. He eventually developed the ability to stand without a mask and not be noticed even by people who knew him. One evening, the Studio Museum had an opening. I was walking there from the subway. A big group of people had gathered outside, jamming into the show, and I was thinking to myself: “God, am I up to dealing with this kind of crowd tonight?” As I was getting closer to the door, I just sensed something. Suddenly, I sensed David. He was standing at the edge of the curb. I looked up and I knew not to say anything. People who would have been amazed to see him there and who knew what he looked like just walked right by him, not seeing him at all. He motioned to me and I went over quietly and we stood there together. Now, I do not know how to be invisible. I have not studied the art of how you make yourself invisible in plain sight. But we stood there together and it was if we weren’t there. To this day, I have no idea how it worked. I said to him: “How is it that no one is seeing us?” And he said: “They’re not looking for us.” We stood there a good twenty or thirty minutes as the crowd died down. He didn’t even go in. Eventually, he just walked away.

As memorable as that was, there’s another experience that sticks with me even more. For many years, David would go to a Japanese restaurant downtown that he liked a lot, around SoHo. One night he invited me and when we finished he said, “Let’s take a walk. You got time?” We walked to a bodega maybe half a block away from the restaurant and he stopped on the sidewalk and looked at something and had a kind of expression of pride on his face. He said to me: “What do you see?” It was nighttime. There were lights on the bodega. I said: “I see the bodega sign. I see the shadows they make. I see a garbage can. I see the windows and what’s in them.” He just nodded. And I thought: “OK, what the hell am I supposed to see? Let me try again.” Finally, I just got frustrated and said, “I’m not seeing it, David. What is it?” He said, “It’s right in front of your face.” He pointed to a spot on the sidewalk, which had a kind of dent in it. I said, “So why does it have a dent in it? Did someone drop something on it?” He started to get exasperated. He said: “Look back at the garbage can, Linda.” The can was metal, and I finally saw that it had a little hole rusted near the bottom and there was a rivulet of water running out of the hole, water that was dripping into the can from an air conditioner above. And I followed the rivulet and realized that the water, that tiny stream of water, had created the indentation in the sidewalk, over God knows how many years, like the beginnings of the Colorado River carving the Grand Canyon. He lived for something like that, to notice how the city works, to see how things become the way they are. I wish I could find that little dent in the sidewalk again. It’s probably long gone by now. I’ll never forget it. It was a huge lesson for me and had an important effect on how I think, to this day.

Through the organization Project Eats that I founded, an urban farm initiative for communities of color in New York, I work a lot with plants now. I watch how plants will bend and twist to get what they need, to get as close as they can to the sun or to water. The plants know where they are. In some respects, we as Homo sapiens have forgotten where we are. We don’t see what’s right in front of our faces anymore. And if we don’t see it, then we’re not aware of it. If we’re not aware of it, we can’t question it, can’t question the world and try to change the things we don’t like. We come to think of the world as an absolute, but nothing is absolute. If we think so, then we allow fear to shape everything we do. But there are ways of looking at the universe that can keep us vital and imaginative and creative and even give us political power in our awareness. Walks with David over the years helped me to understand that and to understand the meaning of art in a way that changed my understanding of life.

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Linda Goode Bryant is a social activist, gallerist and filmmaker. In 1974, she opened Just Above Midtown, a New York gallery that launched the careers of many Black artists. During the global food crisis in 2008, she founded Project EATS, an urban farming initiative. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Peabody Award recipient.

A reprise of David Hammons’s exhibition “Concerto in Black and Blue” is on view at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles from 18 February through 1 June 2025.

In May, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will release a new book created entirely under Hammons’s direction. The publication revisits the artist’s 2019 show at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles, documenting his most expansive presentation to date.