After Alice Coltrane’s death in January 2007, the many who mourned her passing and celebrated her influence — from the jazz world, Hindu and new-age communities, and beyond — did so with a shared sadness and fervor, but for different reasons. They even called her by different names.

To musicians she was first and foremost Alice Coltrane, the Detroit-raised pianist who met John Coltrane in New York City in 1963, married him and joined his band in its late, avant-garde phase before his death in 1967. She went on to release important albums herself, playing piano and harp, accompanied by some of his main musical acolytes.

To spiritual seekers, however, she was Turiyasangitananda — Turiya for short, or simply Swamini, the Hindu term for a female religious teacher. After John’s death, she traversed an intense period of meditation, physical trials and revelations. In 1972, she moved from their house on Long Island to California; a few years later, obeying what she experienced as a divine command, she founded an ashram near Los Angeles. There, the music was devotional, laced with Sanskrit mantras, part of a community life focused on study and worship.

Her impact in her lifetime was significant but segmented. At a memorial gathering at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in May 2007, the program was so rich with jazz greats that it merited a music review in The New York Times. It also featured members of yogic groups whose chants, the critic Nate Chinen wrote, “nodded promisingly toward polyphony but ultimately faltered into vagueness.”

Over time, however, the memory of Alice Coltrane — by any name — has overflowed these niches and seeped into broader culture. A musical biography by the scholar Franya J. Berkman, published in 2010, was the first to treat her oeuvre in full, from Detroit gospel roots through Hindu bhajans. Recent reissues of obscure or rediscovered albums have widened the critical attention.

Last year, the harpist Brandee Younger led tribute concerts in several cities, while the Indian American vocalist Ganavya released a critically praised album rich with Alice Coltrane covers and references. At the pop-culture extreme is a bumper sticker that popped up a few years ago: “Keep Honking! I’m Listening to Alice Coltranes 1971 Meteoric Sensation ‘Universal Consciousness.’”

It almost feels, said the producer and composer Flying Lotus, who is Alice Coltrane’s grandnephew, as if she now has the greater cachet. “I hear more people talk about my Aunt Alice than about John Coltrane, which is fascinating,” he said.

Now, an exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is breaking new ground by examining Alice Coltrane’s influence in a field that she did not practice herself but where her life story has resonated and her ideas have found purchase: contemporary visual art.

The show, “Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal” — the title comes from a short text by Coltrane about her spiritual journey that is being reissued this month after years circulating as a cult item — mixes previous and newly commissioned work by 19 fine artists, some prominent, like Martine Syms, Rashid Johnson and Cauleen Smith, and others less known or just emerging. Roughly half work or have roots in Southern California, anchoring the project in the region.

Organized by the Hammer curator Erin Christovale, with the curatorial assistant Nyah Ginwright, the exhibition proposes several ways to explore Coltrane’s influence. Some works offer direct references, like Smith’s film “Pilgrim,” which she partly filmed at the ashram shortly before the property was sold in 2017, or Ephraim Asili’s film “Isis & Osiris,” which features Younger playing Coltrane’s restored harp. In others — like an installation of industrial light fixtures by Devin T. Mays — the connections are more abstract.

Undergirding the show are materials from Coltrane’s archive that, in many cases, have never before circulated outside her family and ashram circles. Christovale consulted closely with the family and devotees; for some of the show’s new commissions, artists found inspiration in the documents they shared.

For Christovale, who nurtured this project for years, the chance to focus a contemporary art exhibition on Alice Coltrane went beyond stoking her own avowed fandom.

Coltrane, she said, constantly recurred in conversations with artists — mentioned as an inspiration, her music playing in their studios, with the sense, notably but not solely among Black female artists, that her example radiates richly. “She is someone who is part of their artistic experience,” Christovale said. “I would say that it goes beyond music. It’s like a sonic healing that inspires creatives writ large.”

‘The Air Got Thinner and Purer’

The ashram, in its day, was a simple building set on 48 acres in Agoura Hills, in the Santa Monica Mountains. The edifice no longer stands: It burned in 2018, after the property’s sale, in the massive Woolsey wildfire. The spiritual community has dispersed to a degree, but many devotees stay in touch and gather at different homes or online for worship. There is also a small diaspora of young people who grew up at the ashram, including the rapper and singer Doja Cat.

Michelle Coltrane, Alice’s oldest daughter and a singer herself, still lives where the family settled in the late 1970s, on a quiet block in Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley. One afternoon in December, over tea and snacks in her living room, several of the ashram’s elder devotees shared how their path led to Alice Coltrane — or Swamini, as they preferred to call her — decades ago.

Shankari Adams had traveled to California from the East Coast in the early 1970s on an undirected quest. “I was searching for churches, paths, anything,” she said. In San Francisco, she found the One Mind Temple, which was devoted to John Coltrane. But it was a concert by Alice Coltrane, in Berkeley, that blew her mind. In line to meet Alice after the show, she felt a force, she said: “As I got closer the air got thinner and purer, like when you go up in an airplane.”

As for Purusha Hickson, he had come up in Black radical politics, as a teenager in Westchester County, N.Y., and as a student at SUNY Albany. “But I had a lot of questions,” he said. “It looked like sometimes some of the activities that we were doing in the movement were creating more chaos than harmony and liberation.” He hitchhiked and rode Greyhound to San Francisco, then stayed in California. He received Vedantic initiation in 1975, then joined Alice Coltrane’s community. He continues to teach hatha yoga today.

In the ashram’s heyday, services mixed regulars and drop-ins, with an open-door policy. Swamini played organ and sermonized on life, devotion and divinity. She followed Swami Satchidananda, then Sathya Sai Baba, and traveled to India, but studied all religions and developed a message of universal human understanding. In audio excerpts she varies cadence and tone, in the manner of Black church preaching. “She was raised in Detroit,” Christovale said. “Don’t get it twisted.”

Coltrane was only 69 when she died, though she believed she had experienced many past incarnations. She was familiar with untimely death — John Coltrane died at 40; one of their three sons, John Jr., died in a car crash at 17. Either way, she was prepared. “She was always very frank with us,” Michelle Coltrane said. “‘I’m not always going to be here.’”

In her capacity as a primary steward of the legacy of both John and Alice Coltrane, Michelle (who also uses the Hindu name Sita) regularly fields requests of many kinds, but “nothing like this one,” she said of Christovale’s exhibition concept. Gathering the archive and oral histories for the show, she said, only deepened her awe at how much her mother — a widow with four young children in 1967 — achieved.

Over the years, Michelle has observed her mother’s cultural prominence grow, she said, noting the circulation of bootlegged records and her own encounters with music students versed in the obscure works. “It’s shorthand for cool” to know about Alice Coltrane, she said. In her view, the coronavirus pandemic may also have drawn people to Alice’s work. “Maybe people were searching for something else, something to feel,” she added.

Sensory Experiences

In conversations with several artists in the exhibition, the shared pattern was a prior awareness of Alice Coltrane that has focused and sharpened, sometimes prompting specific artworks, but even more so serving as a kind of compass for their life and practice.

Adee Roberson, who has made a platform sculpture that visitors can step onto and hear a sound work composed with the musician Nailah Hunter play from directional speakers, first heard Alice Coltrane’s music some 20 years ago. A punk-rock kid with Jamaican roots, she respected Coltrane’s place in jazz. As an adult, personal setbacks helped her appreciate Coltrane’s trials, while Roberson’s spiritual and healing work — she is trained in several massage and body work practices — unlocked the music’s force.

“When I think of her, I think of how sound really does heal you physically and emotionally and psychically,” Roberson said in her bungalow home-studio in South Los Angeles. Her sculpture is made of selenite — the most cleansing stone, she said. It is shaped like a disc and marked in quadrants after the Kongo cosmogram, which represents the cyclical relationship of material and ancestral worlds.

For the artist Suné Woods, who works in video and collage, the show provided an opportunity to interview a range of people — ashram members, her own family and others — about their spiritual lives. She wove some of these reflections into the soundtrack for her two-channel installation, “On this day in meditation,” which includes original and found footage of Los Angeles-area landscapes made with a thermal camera. While completing the work, Woods meditated every morning at 4 a.m.

The piece is a sensory experience that aims to reflect “what comes through when I meditate,” she said, sitting on the narrow deck of her very small house — a kind of aerie — perched on a steep hillside in the Echo Park neighborhood. “It’s a work where I want you to feel.”

Nicole Miller, a filmmaker in Los Angeles who has lately been working with an early form of laser animation, drew on Alice Coltrane’s Vedic star chart, which was preserved in the archive, to write short phrases that light up in her installation “For Turiya” when sounds run through a synthesizer. The references to the chart are kept oblique, Miller said, out of respect. “I wanted to figure out a way to honor her instead of mining from her,” she said.

An architectural piece by the sculptor GeoVanna Gonzalez, who lives in Miami, involves an aluminum platform structure along with stained glass and a woven rug. Its inspiration is the home that Alice and John Coltrane shared all too briefly in the Dix Hills section of Long Island, which the couple had carefully decorated with furnishings chosen for their spiritual associations. (The home is now a registered historic site and is being restored.) Gonzalez’s work will function as a stage for performances during the show’s run.

For some artists, Alice Coltrane’s life yields prompts of a kind. Bethany Collins, for instance, who lives in Chicago, learned that “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was a favorite of Coltrane from her Detroit church music days. Collins is known for works on paper that blur or alter scores of musical pieces that recur in different times and social contexts. Her series in the show is based on that hymn and on the Largo from Antonin Dvorák’s “New World Symphony” — itself drawn from Negro spirituals, and which Coltrane adapted on one of her albums.

As for Mays, a sculptor and performance-based artist who grew up in Detroit and lives in Galveston, Texas, his installation of light fixtures collected by a particular rule — they must be used, and not discarded or scavenged, but given to him — may seem abstract, yet draws on his understanding of Coltrane’s example.

Alice Coltrane modeled a discipline and dedication that he seeks to emulate as an artist, Mays said. From her, he added, “I could make sense of how one finds a way to stay in practice and to continue to practice all the time.”

“Monument Eternal” isn’t so much an exhibition on Coltrane than it is a show that thinks with Coltrane through a gamut of methods that, in a sense, she makes possible. It arrives in a hard time, not least for artists in Los Angeles grappling with last month’s fires. (The family of Syms, who grew up in Altadena, lost their multigeneration home.) That the ashram building itself was destroyed by fire is an echo that resonates with Christovale, though everything is too raw just now to digest further.

Perhaps, Christovale said by phone recently, the exhibition can be a salutary gathering space. “Her whole expression is rooted in a sense of healing and connecting to a divine power,” she said of Coltrane. “You feel it at a cellular level when you listen to her music. I hope that if anything, a show like this, in a moment like this in this city, can be a space for people to let their shoulders drop.”

Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal

On view Feb. 9 through May 4. The Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles; 310-443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu.