Lloyd Hamrol‘s work has followed the trajectory of art from the 1960s to the present, starting with minimalism and including performance art, conceptual art, and postminimalism. Born in San Francisco in 1937, Hamrol moved to Los Angeles in 1940 and studied at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1965, he won LACMA’s New Talent Purchase Award and was featured that same year in the LACMA exhibition Five Younger Los Angeles Artists with fellow New Talent Award winners Tony Berlant, Mel Edwards, Llyn Foulkes, and Philip Rich. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hamrol was involved with happenings and other ephemeral and participatory art events, collaborating with—among others—Claes Oldenburg and Judy Chicago (to whom he was married from 1969-1979). He then began to focus on public art.
Around 2007, Hamrol returned to making studio-based objects, using heavy-duty industrial felt as his medium. According to art historian and critic Peter Frank, these sculptures “include quasi-architectural references; stacking, pairings, and other compilations of nearly (but, significantly, not exactly) identical units; and the slight skewing of geometric forms, giving them a sometimes voluptuous curvaceousness.” According to the artist, the title of D.D. stands for dark dervish, giving this work a distinctly figural reference. When asked in 2018 if the title had political connotations, Hamrol replied, “It is hard to avoid making a political statement these days....We are all infected by the political environment.” He considers the form of D.D. to be a hybrid of figure and architecture, with ritualistic overtones.