Harmony Hammond

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 two decades participate in the narrative of modernist abstraction at the same 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 retrospective 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 (2020). Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Harmony Hammond: Fringe, SITE Santa Fe, NM (2025); 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, MN (1981), among others. Hammond has also participated in many group exhibitions, including Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Making Their Mark, Shah Garg Foundation, New York, NY (2023), traveling to Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA (2024) and Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, MO (2025); Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021), traveled to Guggenheim Museo Bilbao, Spain (2021); and 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; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, 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); and the Distinguished Feminist Award, College Art Association (2013), 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. Her archive is housed at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA.