South Carolina is one of the 13 original colonies of the United States. European exploration began in 1540, but the explorers brought European diseases that decimated the local Indian population. The English colony of the Province of Carolina was started in Charleston) in 1670, with wealthy planters and their slaves, coming from the British Caribbean colony of Barbados.

Charles Gaines was born in Charleston, S.C., in 1944 and has been described as "one of the first, if not the first, African American, to work in the field of conceptual art." All of this and nothing will feature Gaines's 2008 work Manifestos, consisting of monumental graphite drawings of musical scores conceptually derived from four famous political manifestos. Gaines lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. (Run time: 1 hour, 46 min.)

A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as creeds.

Given the stunning backdrop of recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen -- and perhaps elsewhere in the turbulent Middle East in coming days -- Charles Gaines' exceptional multimedia installation "Manifestos" assumes an unanticipated resonance. Topical relevance makes the complex suite of digital videos, musical compositions and drawings, executed in 2008, even more compelling than it already is.

All of this and nothing is the sixth in the Hammer Museum’s biennial invitational exhibition series, which highlights work of Los Angeles-based artists, both established and emerging, alongside a number of international artists. The artists explore fundamental questions about our experiences of existing in the world and in the potential for art to reveal the mysterious and the magical. Reaching beyond exclusively visual references, many works incorporate aspects of music, literature, science, mathematics, sound, or time into their subject matter or structure.