LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Hammer Museum announced today the appointment of Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Rafa Esparza to its Artist Council.

Established in 2006, the Artist Council is a rotating advisory group of 10-15 internationally renowned, Los Angeles-based artists. The group meets regularly with Hammer curators and leadership to engage in extended conversations about specific programmatic issues at the Hammer as well as broad conceptual questions facing contemporary museums today.

“The Artist Council is a crucial guiding voice within the Hammer Museum, and I’m delighted to see Njideka and Rafa join their ranks. We rely on the Artist Council to challenge and enhance the Hammer’s standing as an intellectual and cultural laboratory of ideas. Njideka and Rafa are valuable additions to this esteemed group,” said Hammer Museum Director Ann Philbin.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship and was awarded Financial Times' Women of the Year, 2016, alongside the Future Generation Art Prize 2017 Shortlist. She is the recipient of the Prix Canson Prize, 2016, Foreign Policy's Leading 100 Global Thinkers of 2015, the Next Generation Prize, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015, the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, 2015, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize, 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include Front Room: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Baltimore Museum of Art [2018] alongside Prospect.4, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, New Orleans, Louisiana [2018]; Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Predecessors, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, which toured to Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2017); Portals, Victoria Miro, London (2016), I Refuse to be Invisible, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (2016) and The Beautyful Ones, Art + Practice, Los Angeles (2015), staged concurrently with a solo presentation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015).

Rafa Esparza was born in 1981 in Los Angeles. Esparza studied at East Los Angeles College before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received his BFA. He currently works in installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, performance, and other mediums and has presented his work at a variety of sites, including traditional fine art contexts and community-based platforms as well as outdoor