“I can’t stand art actually. I’ve never, ever liked art.” So the artist David Hammons told the art historian Kellie Jones in a 1986 interview. Then why do you make it? Ms. Jones asked. Because, Mr. Hammons offered, art is about symbols and “outrageously magical things happen when you mess around with a symbol.” Precisely such things are happening in the exhibition “David Hammons: Five Decades” at Mnuchin Gallery.

At the time of the interview Mr. Hammons was already a star, known for his formal and conceptual brilliance and his unpredictable ways. At various points in the 1980s, he sold snowballs on a sidewalk near the Bowery, erected three-story-high basketball hoops in Brooklyn, and made sculptures from hair swept from Harlem barber shop floors. He was creating — in public places with found materials for non-art-world audiences — odd, witty, barely graspable objects that were also emblems of wealth, class and race. And after making them, he’d change course, and location, or disappear, following a career GPS of his own.