Woodward Lecture Series: Dr. Kellie Jones in Conversation with Zoë Hopkins

Dr. Kellie Jones and Zoë Hopkins will discuss the new book October Files: David Hammons (2025), the first anthology of texts on this luminary contemporary artist. This event is cosponsored by Modern Ancient Brown Foundation and College for Creative Studies’ Woodward Lecture Series. 

October Files: David Hammons (2025) is a collection of essays on the one of the most important living artists of our time, David Hammons (b. 1943). Edited by Kellie Jones, a preeminent scholar of Hammons’ work, this book documents five decades of visual practice from 1982 to the present. The volume features contributions from scholars, artists, and cultural workers, and includes numerous images of the artist and his work that are not widely available. Contributions include essays from cultural critics including Guy Trebay and Greg Tate; artists Coco Fusco and Glenn Ligon; and scholars such as Robert Farris Thompson, Alex Alberro, and Manthia Diawara.

A star of the West Coast Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and the winner of a Prix de Rome prize as well as a MacArthur Fellowship, David Hammons rose to fame in Los Angeles with his body prints, in which he used his entire body as a printing plate. His later work engaged with materials that he found in urban environments—from greasy brown paper bags, discarded hair from barber shops, and empty bottles of cheap wine—which he turned into things of wonder while also commenting on a country’s neglect of its citizens. In this volume, a new generation of scholars, Tobias Wofford, Abbe Schriber, and Sampada Aranke, broaden the theoretical mapping of Hammons’s  career and its impact, challenging viewers to imagine, in the words of Aranke, “how to see like Hammons.”

Kellie Jones is Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art in the Department of Art History & Archaeology and a Professor in the Department African American & African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.

Zoë Hopkins is a writer, scholar, and independent art critic. She is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she focuses on contemporary black poetics and art. Her writing on art has been published in The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, ArtReview, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail, in addition to several exhibition catalogs.

Free parking is available at the CCS Brush Street lot. The entrance is located on Brush Street, just north of Fredericks.

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