Out of breath at the Hammer
Hey, it’s the white man’s fault
“Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice”
by Bondo Wyszpolski
This is an exhibition that “explores the intersection of art, nature, health, equity, justice, and collective action” because “This is the most consequential decade in modern history,” says Conservation International.
In the catalog that accompanies “Breath(e),” which is on view at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, co-curators Glenn Kaino and Mika Yoshitake begin by bringing up “the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes, George Floyd’s murder, and the momentum of Black Lives Matter” as incentives for their “global discussions about social and climate justice.”
“Breath(e)” is one of the many citywide exhibitions linked to the Getty initiative “PST ART: Art and Science Collide,” which has opened the doors for dozens of institutions, galleries and museums, to hone in on their personal agendas.

“Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice,” installation view. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Sarah Golonka
Oh, c’mon, who talks or thinks like that? Can you put it into plain English?

Cannupa Hanska Luger, materials for the installation “Sovereign,” 2024. Courtesy of the artist
If this isn’t a deliberate parody, then it’s simply pretentious writing. Yoshitake and Kaino sought out artists for their project who slotted nicely into their program, many of them younger men and women who are making careers in art out of being disadvantaged or feeling alienated. One gets the impression that, in order to appear hip or with-it, they’ve concocted fancy concepts, proposals and statements, and then created work that tries to put one over on us.
Yangkura, for example, collects human debris that has washed up on the shores of Korea, North and South (ocean currents ignore politics), and on the Japanese island of Tsushima, and then makes “costumes” from them in order to bring awareness of our polluting the oceans. Roxy Paine constructs thousands of scientifically accurate reproductions of mushrooms, which she then arranges on a Turkman geometric rug, thus “underscoring the important role played by fungi in balancing our ecosystems.” Brandon Ballengée’s “paintings” of fish and other marine life that have disappeared in the wake of the Deep Water Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico are made from materials gathered from the polluted habitat.
Those are some of the projects on view in “Breath(e).”

Tiffany Chung, “stored in a jar: monsoon, dreaming fish, color of water, and the floating world” (2010-11). Photo by Bondo Wyszpolski
And naturally, since the blame game is never far away, one of the recurrent refrains is this: It’s the white man’s fault.
Leah Penniman informs us that “The history of the white man’s use of the earth in America is a scandal.” And, it follows, that “The voices and expertise of Black, Brown, and Indigenous environmentalists must be heeded if we are to halt and reverse planetary calamity.”
Sherri Mitchell (Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset) essentially lays the blame for the conflagration that destroyed Lāhainā, “once a tropical paradise,” at the doorstep of the white colonizer: “In the mid-1800s, laws passed by white men gave wealthy landowners a foothold into this fertile land, resulting in the overthrow and (illegal) annexation of Hawai’i. Once they had taken control of the land, the wealthy white industrialists replaced Maui’s diverse ecosystem with monocrops of sugarcane and pineapple.”
And Kimberly Bains, in her essay, “Alchemy for Our Times”: “I join the array of Black, Indigenous, and postcolonial and settler-colonial studies scholars, among others, who argue for attention to the rise of European colonization, which coincided with large-scale projects of extraction and extinction of geological, ecological, and human matter.”

Information plaque at the Natural History Museum. Photo by Bondo Wyszpolski
Here’s the — apologetic? — copy on one plaque: “All the animals in the Museum’s original African dioramas were shot in the 1920s by one wealthy donor named Leslie Simson. While legal, Simson’s hunting was part of a colonial system that favored rich white foreigners like himself over the rights of local people.”
This is a polite way of saying that Simson was a bastard who helped exploit the Dark Continent, even though it’s not necessarily white poachers who are today putting African mammals on the endangered species list. And while it may be hard to deny or contradict what Penniman or Mitchell or Bains assert about racism and colonialism, I’m positive that none of them would prefer being in gang-infested Haiti or Somali, or having their sons and daughters abducted in Nigeria or butchered in Sudan. Anyway you slice it, sisters, it’s a crappy world everywhere.
What’s sort of ironic about the plaques at the Natural History Museum, those that overtly or covertly point a finger at white colonialism, is that they’re also printed in Spanish, and perhaps most Spanish-speaking visitors are descendents of their own colonizers, Spanish conquistadors who did quite a number on the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America. So those brown bodies aren’t exactly in the clear, either.

Karah Son as Cio-Cio-San in LA Opera’s 2024 production of “Madame Butterfly.” (Photo: Cory Weaver)
This one-person gestapo squad appears to forget that art adheres to its own rules and morals, not hers, and that “Madame Butterfly” was written well over 100 years ago by a white male composer for a European audience. And, besides, the story is really about trust and faith, misunderstanding and heartbreak — some very universal concerns.
I suspect that other projects and exhibitions tied to the current Pacific Standard Time initiative are using it to reflect personal biases and agendas which often, as the saying goes, “need context.” The Academy Museum, for instance, has opened two new exhibitions, one of them being “Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations in Cinema.” In her opening remarks about color calibration in the accompanying catalog, former director and president Jacqueline Stewart writes that it was “a practice that favored white skin and fostered racial biases on film materials.”
Early films in Europe and the U.S. were mostly made by white filmmakers for white audiences, so of course white skin would be “favored,” just as the treasure trove of early Japanese films favored the skin tones of their filmmakers, actors, and audiences.
I’ve gone off on a wide tangent, but one that as an objective and subjective viewer has been hard to ignore. I suppose what I’ve encountered is indicative of the divisiveness that exists throughout our society. Injustice abounds and yet there doesn’t seem to be much healing.

“Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice,” installation view. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Sarah Golonka
The catalog ends with a peculiar essay, “The Book We Didn’t Make & The One That We Did,” which apparently wants us to think upon and perhaps question how the production and distribution of books adds to the carbon footprint, that is, affecting the environment and I guess spreading more soot across the sky. Well, like all material goods, books involve labor, materials and manufacturing, and they need to be shipped. And where this catalog was concerned, no one put a gun to their heads and demanded they produce one, did they?
Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice is on view through Jan. 5 at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles. Hours, Tuesday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Monday. Call (310) 443-7000 or visit hammer.ucla.edu. ER