Skip to content

Bio Summary

Harmony Hammond - Artists - Alexander Gray Associates

Harmony Hammond, 2019. Photo: Clayton Porter

Harmony Hammond (b.1944) is an artist, writer, and curator. A leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s, she attended the University of Minnesota from 1963–67 before moving to New York in 1969. She was a co-founder of A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York (1972) and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics (1976). Since 1984, Hammond has lived and worked in northern New Mexico, teaching at the University of Arizona, Tucson from 1989–2006. Her groundbreaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000) received a Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary text on the subject. Hammond’s earliest feminist work combined gender politics with post-minimal concerns of materials and process, frequently occupying a space between painting and sculpture.

Biography

Harmony Hammond (b.1944) is an artist, writer, and curator. A leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s, she attended the University of Minnesota from 1963–67 before moving to New York in 1969. She was a co-founder of A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York (1972) and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics (1976). Since 1984, Hammond has lived and worked in northern New Mexico, teaching at the University of Arizona, Tucson, from 1989–2006. Hammond’s earliest feminist work combined gender politics with post-minimal concerns of materials and process, frequently occupying a space between painting and sculpture.

For years, she has worked with found and repurposed materials and objects such as rags, straw, latex rubber, hair, linoleum, roofing tin, and burnt wood as well as buckets, gutters and water troughs as a means of introducing content to the world of abstraction. Hammond’s near-monochrome paintings of the last decade participate in the narrative of modernist abstraction at the same as time they insist on an oppositional discourse of feminist and queer content. Their focus on materiality and the indexical, suggesting topographies of body and place, derives from and remains in conversation with her feminist work of the 1970s. A second ongoing series of overtly political work in various media ranging from bronze sculpture to digital prints, deals with issues of intolerance, censorship, and self-censorship.

A survey exhibition of Hammond’s work, Material Witness, Five Decades of Art, was presented in 2019 at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, and traveled to the Sarasota Art Museum, Ringling College of Art and Design, FL in 2020. Other one-person exhibitions of her work include Becoming/UnBecoming Monochrome, RedLine, Denver, CO (2014); Big Paintings 2002–2005, Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM (2005); Monster Prints, SITE Santa Fe, NM (2002); and Ten Years 1970–1980, Glen Hanson Gallery and W.A.R.M, Minneapolis, NM (1981), among others. Hammond’s work has been included in many group exhibitions, including Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021), traveled to Guggenheim Museo Bilbao, Spain (2021); Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019); Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007), traveled to National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2007); MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2008); and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia (2008), among others.

Hammond’s work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2014); the Lifetime Achievement Award, Women’s Caucus for Art (2014); the Distinguished Feminist Award, College Art Association (2013); Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (2007 and 1989); Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (1998); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1991); and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1983 and 1979), among others. Hammond’s book, Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts (1984), is a foundational publication on 1970s feminist art. Her groundbreaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000) received a Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary text on the subject.

Download CV

Public Collections

Art Institute of Chicago, IL
Bartlett Center for the Visual Arts, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK
Brooklyn Museum, New York
Denver Art Museum, CO
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY
Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, NY
Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York, NY
Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC
New Mexico Arts, State Public Art Collection, NM
New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM
Orlando Museum of Art, FL
Phoenix Art Museum, AZ
Rendez-vous International Sculpture Site, Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, Providence, RI
Roswell Museum, NM
Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, CA
St. Thomas More Chapel, Fordham University, Bronx, NY
Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM
Tucson Museum of Art, AZ
University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC
Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Video

Video Thumbnails
Harmony Hammond in conversation with Amy Smith-Stewart, senior curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2020).

Harmony Hammond in conversation with Amy Smith-Stewart, senior curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2020).

Harmony Hammond in conversation with Holland Cotter (2019). 

Harmony Hammond in conversation with Holland Cotter (2019).