Before making my way to the Hammer Museum to see Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal, I drove up into the Santa Monica Mountains—a pilgrimage of sorts—to see the former site of Alice Coltrane’s ashram. Coltrane first founded a spiritual center in LA in 1975. In 1983, she relocated the center to the Triunfo Canyon as the Shanti Anantam Ashram and later rededicated it Sai Ashantam Ashram (Ashantam meaning infinity in Hindu). Alice, known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda, lived and led a spiritual and musical community at Sai Ashantam Ahsram up until her death at UCLA’s West Valley Medical Center in 2007.
It’s fitting then that Monument Eternal, the 10,000 square foot exhibition component to “The Year of Alice,” was showing at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, while her home and papers are in Deer Park, New York. Monumental indeed, “The Year of Alice” is hosted by The John & Alice Coltrane Home and the Coltrane Family, in partnership with Impulse! Records, Detroit Jazz Festival, Hammer Museum, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, The New York Historical Society, and more. “The Year” includes vinyl record releases, the restoration of Coltrane’s harp, an oral history initiative, a Coltrane-inspired ballet, and more.
Monument Eternal was more than an art exhibition. A combination of contemporary visual art inspired by Coltrane, sound installations, large-scale photographs, and archival material, the exhibition was an embarrassment of riches. Sights and sounds blended together, at times beyond comprehension and always towards transcendence—just like Alice’s music.
The exhibition began slowly and ascended dramatically. Rounding the first corner, one was immediately consumed by a floor-to-ceiling photograph by Hozumi Nakadaira of Alice and John Coltrane at the 1966 Newport Jazz Festiva. Alice sits squarely at the piano, hands clasped in her lap. John stands behind and over her, reaching down to the keys. The photograph, stunning as it is, dwarfed the show’s first centerpiece. An inverted saxophone mounted on a steel rail and threaded with rope that protrudes from its keys, Jamal Cyrus’ Horn Beam Effigy (2022) becomes a reminder of John’s giant shadow behind and over Alice and the saxophone itself.
Thus one of the show’s first and most urgent inquiries was not of the eternal monument that is Alice herself, but of the eternal monument that was John to Alice—of his incredible impact on Alice in life and death. In a Frieze roundup responding to the exhibition, critic and archivist Harmony Holiday writes, “I believe that true love existed once upon a time in the long, neverending history of Black music and that it was immortalized in the tones and frequencies Alice and John Coltrane attained together in exile and reunion with one another.”
The musical influence of Alice Coltrane cannot be overstated. In LA alone, she can be heard in the music of Jeff Parker, Kamasi Washington, Kendrick Lamar, and of course, Flying Lotus, her grandnephew. In one dark room, a Flying Lotus composition played on loop. In another room, a short documentary, Isis and Osiris (2024) by filmmaker Ephraim Asili, featured Brandee Younger, the most successful jazz harpist today, playing Alice’s newly restored harp. (Elsewhere, Younger appeared on records produced by the country’s most vital independent jazz label, International Anthem, from whose extensive catalog one would be hard pressed to find an album that isn’t dripping with Alice’s spiritual jazz influence.) Through her influence, Coltrane is eternal. This is the show’s thesis.
Of all the riches of Coltrane’s influence, most interesting to me was LA-based filmmaker Cauleen Smith’s 7-minute video, Pilgrim (2017), which prominently features scenes shot in 4K at Sai Ashantam Ahsram by Arthur Jafa. The film opens with shots of the sun streaming into the ashram and onto one of Coltrane’s organs enclosed in a dusty transparent acrylic case—a stunningly beautiful scene of the preservation of a monument. Pilgrim is a window into Sai Ashantam Ahsram in the decade between Coltrane’s death and its closure the same year the film was released. In Pilgrim, the shadows are cast by the Santa Monica Mountains, the Watts Towers, and Alice’s mother’s headstone. These are, what Smith calls, “sites where utopias happened.” In a video made for the Hammer about her film, Smith describes Coltrane as a “world-building musician”—one whose music is “so large it has to be enacted through place and with other people.” Pilgrim shows Sai Ashantam Ahram as a collectively enacted spiritual and musical utopia. The year after Pilgrim was made, Sai Ashantam Ashram burned to the ground in the 96,000-acre Woolsey Fire.
As I turned onto Triunfo Canyon Road, I noticed four property sale signs. A bit further down the road signs of landslides. When I got out of the car to approach the gate (surveilled 24 hours) I saw scarred trees with bright green leaves. The ashram was gone, but its foundation was still there. I sat for a while and listened to the sound of mourning doves.
Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
February 9, 2025 to May 4, 2025