David Hammons, Higher Goals, Card, Public Art Fund, 1986

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Offset print, 7″ x 5″.

The non-profit Public Art Fund was founded in 1977 to present site-specific installations in outdoor spaces throughout the five boroughs of New York, feeding artists’ growing desires for an audience larger and more diverse than the regular gallery-going crowd.

Hammons’s temporary installation consisted of five telephone poles adorned with bottle caps in geometric patterns and surmounted by basketball hoops. The oversized posts—double or triple the height of a regulation backboard—wryly evoked the idea of sports stardom as an out-of-reach aspiration, especially for poor young African-Americans.

Front
Front
Reverse
Reverse

DOWNTOWN ERA EXHIBITION HOMEPAGE

African Diaspora David Hammons Political and Public Art Postcards Public Art Fund

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40 Top Art Events of the Downtown Era: A Timeline, 1974–1992
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The Downtown Era began in the 1970s, when aspiring artists of the baby-boomer generation arrived in New York. Over the next two decades, they would radically change the art world, opening it up to new forms of media, new modes of exhibiting art, and new social perspectives.