The Filipino artist David Medalla grew up in the 1940s in Manila, a city that had been leveled by the bloody battle between Japanese and American forces during W.W. II. His celebrated 1963–77 series “Cloud Canyons”—kinetic sculptures in which soapy liquid was turned into foam—would take inspiration from those war years, the expanding bubbles of soap a metaphoric representation of the bubbling of blood from the mouth of a dying guerilla. The Hammer Museum’s comprehensive survey on Medalla, the first U.S. exhibition on this pioneering artist, features paintings, sculptures, and photographs that date from the late 1950s up through the years before his death, in 2020. —Paulina Prosnitz