JIMMIE DURHAM: AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

When: Through May 7. 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday.

Where: Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles.

Admission: Free.

Information: 310-443-7000. hammer.ucla.edu.

When: Through May 7. 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday.

Where: Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles.

Admission: Free.

Information: 310-443-7000. hammer.ucla.edu.

Jimmie Durham is not a household name.

But the 76-year-old half-Cherokee artist who has been living and working outside of the United States since 1987 is an important figure in the art world, and the Hammer Museum is giving him his due with “Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World,” which is on view through May 7.

The retrospective features about 200 works from the 1970s to the present.

“He’s an incredibly prolific artist,” says Anne Ellegood, the exhibition’s curator. “He has a lot of important things to say about this history of the United States and a lot of the social and political issues that are always bubbling up here.”

Durham is mostly a sculptor, but he also makes drawings, videos and photographs.

The featured works include Malinche, a large sculpture of the indigenous Mexican woman who became the translator and companion to the Spanish conquistador and explorer Hernan Cortes.

She’s based on a Pocahontas figure Durham created for a London exhibition in the late ’80s.

“Jimmie is interested in how the stories of Native Americans as historical figures often get skewed in accounts,” Ellegood says. “In 1992, he was in an exhibition that was looking at Latin America and its different social, cultural and political issues. So he took Pocahontas and he turned her into Malinche, and she’s remained Malinche ever since then.”

As with much of Durham’s work, the figure is made from a wide range of materials: a cactus leaf for a foot, snakeskin on her wood-carved face, plastic jewelry, a glass eye.

The exhibition opens with different examples of natural and artificial materials commonly found in his work, which, as visitors move through, they’ll see.

But Durham is not just a visual artist. He’s a poet, performer and activist for Native American rights.

“He’s an incredibly curious person who thinks in a multidisciplinary way, but having said that I think of him as a sculptor and he does too,” Ellegood says.

Durham was active in the New York art scene for much of the 1980s and ’90s, including showing at the 1993 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, even after moving to Cuernavaca, Mexico (an international hotbed of intellectuals, radicals and artists), and then to Europe, where he still lives part time between Berlin and Naples.

But by 1995, he stopped doing shows in the U.S.

“New York in the ’80s gave a lot of attention to multiculturalism and identity politics, so he was in a lot of exhibitions with other artists of color, showing at small nonprofit spaces trying to create visibility for these artists,” Ellegood says. “Jimmie felt that his work was only being viewed and understood through the lens of identity, and he really wanted a broader context. In fact, he started to show rather quickly in big, international shows.”

Ellegood has been proposing Durham do a career retrospective in the U.S. since first reaching out to him in Berlin a decade ago.

He wasn’t interested at the time, but receptive to her visits.

“He’s a very warm and welcoming person,” she says. “He likes to be around people so often. When I’d spend time with Jimmie, it would turn into an all-day thing. We’d end up having a couple of meals together because he loves to cook.”

When Ellegood joined the Hammer Museum seven years ago, she started acquiring his works as a show of support.

Durham finally gave the OK for a retrospective show three years ago.

“The question of his legacy and who he is as an artist in the history of American art as well as internationally is really an important one, and without him doing a show like this, I don’t think the story would be told,” Ellegood says. “He’s incredibly unique, and I don’t think you can compare him to anyone else.”

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