FOUND: David Hammons ATL Sculptures

David Hammons was among the fourteen artists commissioned to make permanent works for the new Atlanta Airport in 1979-80. For more than ten years, I’d tried to find out what Hammons’ work was like, and if it still existed. Dr. Kellie C. Jones had seen the works, of course, which “is made from a variety of hair constructions. Located over an escalator that connects Concourse C with the intra-airport transportation system, he installed different configurations in each of four overhead bays. Glittering brown bags with hair tassels; a linear, automatist scrawl of hair strung wire; swooping bird-like forms of dowels, feathers, hair balls, and 45-rpm records that conjure up the work’s title, Flight Fantasies (1980).” David Hammons, Untitled (Flight Fantasy), 1978, bamboo, Georgia clay, record fragments, plaster, colored string and hair, 22 x 60 x 9 in, sold at Christie’s in 2o24 But her footnote was troubling: “Although this work by Hammons and those of the thirteen other artists…