Discovering the World of James Hampton

Everyone has a perspective on life that is different from others. We all have different view points. However, they are just that, points of view. Many of those perspectives deal with issues such as religion, and politics, or just everyday life. One individual, James Hampton, held a deep religious conviction and he felt it was his mission to represent that conviction visually through art. In the late 1960’s he rented out a garage in Washington D.C. He worked as a custodian within a Federal building. For 14 years he worked on evenings and weekends creating a single work of art out of foil. He never formally showed the work of art to the public because of an early death.

His work of art represented a monument to the second coming of Christ by creating a throne surrounded by angelic symbols using silver foil such as Reynold’s Wrap. Aluminum foil use to be called tin foil and became popular in America directly after World War II. Therefore, when James Hampton started using it the product had never been produced to the level or quality until then. It offered a more awe-inspiring visual impact.

View the short video below and discover a work of art that transcends art and becomes other worldly. It a creation that has received attention and importance for over 50 years from world renown artists and yet James Hampton was never an artist. He considered himself a Prophet as found in the Bible.

Little is known about James Hampton, despite the grandeur of his self-chosen title: “Director, Special Projects for the State of Eternity.” He was born in 1909 in Elloree, South Carolina, a small community of predominately Afrian-American sharecroppers and tenant farmers. His father, a gospel singer and self-ordained Baptist minister, left his wife and four children to pursue his itinerant calling.

Hampton became one of six million African Americans who fled the rural South in the early and mid-twentieth century to seek a better life in the cities of the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West. In 1928, he joined his older brother in Washington, D.C. and in 1942 was drafted into the U.S. Army and served with a segregated unit that maintained airstrips in Saipan and Guam during World War II. In 1945, he returned to Washington and worked as a janitor for the General Services Administration until his death in 1964. It is believed he had made one small, shrine-like object by the time he left Guam, and later integrated this element into his larger work.

Hampton was regarded as a humble man, but often referred to himself as “St. James.” He may have considered himself a prophet like John, the author of the Book of Revelation. That section of the Bible inspired Hampton’s belief in the Second Coming of Christ’s return to earth. Hampton had expressed interest in finding a “holy woman” to assist with his life’s work, yet he never married and had few close friends. His creation was not a complete secret and he told people he knew that he hoped one day to have his own congregation. Yet The Throne was scarcely known until his death in 1964, why it came to the public’s attention through the owner of the space. Hampton was fifty-six wen he died; his monument to faith was never completely finished.

Can you find the light bulbs? Hampton would take home burned out light bulbs from his job and place them into his sculpture. Nothing is recorded of the meaning of his symbols, however, the angel wings are very clear as well as the crowns. He created a second written language that was also made up of symbols known only to him as shown below.

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