Starting this Sunday, the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is admission free. And the free-for-all will have a new exhibit that tells viewers they can take it or leave it.

Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology is the first large-scale exhibition to focus on the intersection of two vitally important genres of contemporary art: appropriation (taking and recasting existing images, forms, and styles from mass-media and fine art sources) and institutional critique (scrutinizing and confronting the structures and practices of our social, cultural, and political institutions). The exhibition brings together works by thirty-six American artists who came to prominence between the late 1970s and the early 1990s.

Although Take It or Leave It is a historical show focusing on a period in the recent past, it also includes recent work, arguing for the continued relevance of these artists’ practices and also revealing their sustained commitment to both historically recognizable and emerging strategies of appropriation and institutional critique. The exhibition highlights dynamic practices in notably diverse mediums, including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, text, and performance. The works are by turns subtle and aggressive, poetic and didactic, emotional and intellectual. They are as challenging as they are rewarding, as radical as they are rational. Take It or Leave It seeks to revive and participate in the meaningful debates that the artists have fostered over time and to instill a desire for critique, in its many forms, to remain a cornerstone of American art.

Judith Barry
Gretchen Bender
Dara Birnbaum
Nayland Blake
Tom Burr
Mark Dion
Mark Dion & Jason Simon
Jimmie Durham
Andrea Fraser
Robert Gober
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Renée Green
Jenny Holzer
Mike Kelley
Mary Kelly
Silvia Kolbowski
Barbara Kruger
Louise Lawler
William Leavitt
Zoe Leonard
Sherrie Levine
Glenn Ligon
Paul McCarthy
Allan McCollum
John Miller
Matt Mullican
Cady Noland
Adrian Piper
Stephen Prina
Martha Rosler
Haim Steinbach
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Christopher Williams
Sue Williams
Fred Wilson
David Wojnarowicz