After Sturtevant (After Hammons)

Post-Conceptual Reflections on Appropriation, Identity, and Echo

By Rafael Melendez
London, 2025

In 1993, David Hammons created In the Hood, a minimalist yet charged sculpture: a severed sweatshirt hood, nailed to the wall. Stripped from its body, it became a symbol of absence and racialized visibility — a haunting gesture that speaks to power, erasure, and resistance.
(For reference: David Hammons at Mnuchin Gallery — Artnet)

Thirty years later, my project After Sturtevant (After Hammons) revisits that gesture through a double lens: the recursive strategy of Sturtevant’s post-appropriation and my own conceptual frameworks of Abstract Psychofigurism and Primitivoxelism.

The Work

These hooded forms are both sculptural and psychological. The opening of the hood functions like a void, a site of projection. By isolating it, I’m not only echoing Hammons’s social commentary but filtering it through Sturtevant’s methodology of repetition as critical mirror — the copy as conceptual device.

In this translation, the “after” becomes a system: not imitation but loop. Each reiteration questions authorship, authenticity, and affect.

Installation Context

The works were shown within a spatial constellation: mirrors reflecting viewers back into the work, and a table presenting artist books and printed material. The hoods hung quietly nearby — relics, witnesses, or placeholders for unseen figures.

This interplay between the visible and the withdrawn resonates with Hammons’s critique of institutional visibility while aligning with my ongoing interest in loops, absence, and coded gestures.

Echo and Inheritance

As I wrote elsewhere, my practice transforms idea into matter — yet here, matter acts like a signal.
Hammons’s act of removal becomes for me a metaphor of translation — from political gesture to psychological imprint, from social commentary to internal architecture.

In this sense, After Sturtevant (After Hammons) continues my exploration of how meaning mutates through repetition, context, and affective residue.

What happens when a symbol of resistance is reinterpreted through another frame — and then again through mine?
What remains — the body, the trace, or the echo?