Harmony Hammond


Harmony Hammond is an American artist, activist, curator, and writer.

Biography

Harmony Hammond earned a B.A. of Arts in painting from the University of Minnesota in 1967. She co-founded the A.I.R. Gallery in 1972; it was the first women's cooperative art gallery in New York. She also co-founded ' in 1976, and co-edited issues #1, 3 and 9, and published articles in seven issues. Heresies was founded by Heresies Collective, whose core group consisted of Joyce Kozloff, Miriam Schapiro, Joan Semmel, Lucy Lippard, Mary Beth Edelson, Nancy Spero, and Harmony Hammond. She was an instructor at the New York Feminist Art Institute.
Hammond moved to New York in 1969, just months after the Stonewall Riots. During the late 1960s, Hammond was married for a short time, and found out she was pregnant with her daughter, at which point she and her husband decided to part ways. In 1973, Hammond publicly came out as a lesbian.
Hammond curated A Lesbian Show in 1978 at 112 Greene Street Workshop, featuring works by lesbian artists. She was one of the featured artists in the "Great American Lesbian Art Show" at the Woman's Building in 1980. In 1981, Hammond curated and exhibited her work in Home Work: The Domestic Environment As Reflected in the Work of Women Artists, sponsored by the New York State Council of the Arts and The Women's Hall of Fame, Seneca Falls, NY. She also curated an exhibition in 1999 at Plan B Evolving Arts in Santa Fe titled Out West, bringing together 41 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and two-spirit artists from the Southwest.
Hammond authored her first book, Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art, and the Martial Arts, a corpus of her writings from 1973 to 1983 published by TSL Press, in 1984. In 2000 she published Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History. She is featured in two 2010 films on feminist art - ', directed by Joan Braderman which focuses on the founders of the magazines Heresies: A Feminist Publication of Art and Politics in 1976; and !Women Art Revolution, directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson.
In 1984, she moved to New Mexico. As a tenured full professor, Hammond taught painting, combined media and graduate critiques at the University of Arizona in Tucson, from 1988 to 2005. Hammond continues to teach workshops and writes, curates, and lectures on feminist, lesbian, and queer art.

Works and recognition

In her art, Hammond asserts that traditionally feminine qualities are worthwhile artistic subjects and means for artistic creation. To this end, for example, she created sculptures in the early 1970s featuring swaths of fabric, a traditionally feminine material, as a primary material. There were four fabric series: Bags, Presences, Floorpieces, and Wrapped Sculptures. Harmony Hammond's paintings themselves show how they were made and are almost all abstract. In the 1990s Hammond primarily made mixed-media installations that incorporated a range of traditionally non-art materials with traditional oil painting, and in the first decade of the 2000s, her focus was on making monochrome abstract paintings.
Hammond has had more than 30 solo exhibitions internationally. Her works have been shown in the Tucson Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Academy Museum, and Museo Tamayo. Her works are also included in permanent collections in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.
She has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation among others. In 2013, the Women's Caucus for Art announced that Hammond will be one of the 2014 recipients of the organization's Lifetime Achievement Award. Harmony Hammond Papers were acquired by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles in 2016.
Harmony Hammond: Material Witness, Five Decades of Art, Hammond's first museum survey, is currently taking place at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Presences

This was a series of works created in 1971-1972. It was her first mager series. Seven of these pieces are included in her Material Witness collection. These artworks are fabric scraps soaked in paint, densely sewn together and on a hanger strung from the ceiling. Presences was presented at Harmony Hammond's first solo exhibition in New York in 1973. The fabric is all different lengths with some strips being layered or tied together to be longer. "Six fabric sculptures appearing slightly larger than life size hang from the ceiling and graze the floor, inviting viewers to join them. Paint applied by artist Harmony Hammond imparts earthy tones to these layered scraps of cloth. Spots of bright color and pattern peek out here and there—plaids, polka dots, florals." Harmony Hammond’s intention behind the works was to capture the history of women being creative and claiming their space. She wanted them to look ghostly and yet corporeal. So that they would look toward the past but still have purpose and weight. All the fabric she used was donated old clothes and bed sheets from her friends that also identified as queer, feminist, or an artist. The pieces represent all the past queer woman and non gender confomring artists who paved the way and contributed to art before Hammond and how she and her friends are contributing now.

Floorpieces

In 1973, Hammond created a series of artworks titled Floorpieces. Hammond created these rugs through a traditional braiding style with colorful, remnant fabric she had found in dumpsters. The rag-rugs were then painted selectively with acrylic pigment and were displayed on the ground like rugs. Most of Hammond's Floorpieces were approximately 5 ft. in diameter and almost 2 in. thick. The size and detail of Hammond's artwork is hard to obtain from reproductions and photographs, therefore insisting on the importance of a present viewer. Hammond's Floorpieces challenged the binary between Art and Craft.

Collections

Material Witness, Five Decades of Art, was a collection of over 50 works ranging from the 1970's to 2018. They include materials that range from textiles, to rubber latex, to even her own blood.

Political

Abstract Art

Harmony Hammond wrote an essay in 1977 laying out her personal views. She states that a personal statement is as political one. She believes that abstract art is the most political because it is a “record of present feeling.” Hammond refers to her abstract works as her visual diaries. She claims that abstract art is a tool for feminist and queer artists to claim and explore the textures of subjectivity.