David Hammons

His 1982 installation Higher Goals, originally sited in his Harlem neighbourhood, remains one of the most discussed works in American^[1] public art. Forty-foot basketball hoops, too high to be usable, were decorated with bottle caps in geometric patterns evoking African beadwork and wind chimes referencing Native American spirit catchers. The work grew from a conversation with local teenagers who told him that sport was their ticket out; Hammons made the hoop literally unreachable while filling the surrounding air with the cultural references those same teenagers were walking past.

Public Enemy (1991), made for MoMA, worked differently: visitors entered what felt like a festive environment of crunching autumn leaves and drifting helium balloons before encountering large photographs of a Roosevelt monument flanked by a Black man and a Native American^[1] man cast as servants, the arrangement ringed by sandbags with guns pointing inward. It is characteristic Hammons: draw you in with sensory pleasure, then confront you with something you cannot unsee.

Through the 1990s and 2000s Hammons remained deliberately hard to exhibit, selling snowballs on a Manhattan pavement and staging events that evaporated before critics could review them. His eventual absorption into the institutional mainstream has not dulled the work's edge, and an auction record stretching into the millions reflects the scarcity he engineered long before he appeared to care about the market.