CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/9/2025

'Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal' opens at the Hammer!

Published to accompany the Hammer Museum’s highly anticipated exhibition on view through May 4, Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal is out now and going fast. Pairing Coltrane’s work and cultural legacy with works by 19 contemporary artists—including Rashid Johnson, Cauleen Smith and Jennie C. Jones, among others—this clothbound hardcover with tipped-on cover image is an exquisitely considered and produced design object as well as a must-have volume of scholarship for collectors of books on art, music, Vedic religious practices or Black cultural history. Named after Coltrane’s iconic 1977 book (written in order to “fulfill a divine command”), Monument Eternal “calls forth her important autobiography and brings together a collective of contemporary Black American artists who are influenced by her cultural impact and production,” Erin Christovale writes. She concludes, “I believe Coltrane’s legacy resonates with so many, specifically with the group of artists included in this exhibition, because her story offers a self-paved path toward liberation and pursuit of the divine. After the immeasurable grief from the loss of her husband John and son John Jr., who died in an accident at the age of seventeen, Coltrane actively took on the mourning processes, knowing that beyond grief there is transcendence. Her intimate knowledge of this process and her understanding of a higher power fostered a cultural output that still remains to be fully understood.”

Photo: Alice Coltrane, c. 1978. Courtesy of the John & Alice Coltrane Home.