Harmony Hammond
Photograph Source
From NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS
Hammond’s semi-abstract imagery alludes to both personal and political content. More recently, she has developed mixed-media paintings, incorporating roots, hair, leaves, straw, leather, and other evocative found objects.
In addition to her work as an artist, Hammond is an influential art theorist and writer and a pioneer of the Feminist Art Movement. In 1972, she co-founded A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York City, and in 1976, she became co-editor of the journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics. Hammond also wrote Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art & the Martial Arts (1984) and Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000).
Born in 1944 in Chicago, Hammond received her BFA from the University of Minnesota in 1967 and studied during the summer at Alliance Française in Paris from 1967 through 1969. In 1984, she relocated to New Mexico, where she lives and works today.
Her work has been exhibited at the New Mexico Museum of Art; the New Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tucson Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands. Hammond has received two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Installation view of “Harmony Hammond: Material Witness: Five Decades of Art,” 2019, showing six examples from her “Presence” series, 1971–1972, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut.