Harmony Hammond

Harmony Hammond (b.1944) was 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 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 Harmony Hammond’s work opened in 2019 at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT. Hammond’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally in venues such as the Museum of the City of New York, NY (2016); New Mexico Museum of Art, Sante Fe, NM (2016); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung, Ludwig, Vienna, Austria (2016); Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2015); RedLine Art Space, Denver, CO (2014); National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2011); MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2008); Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2008); Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Internacional Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2007); Neue Galerie, Graz, Austria (2007); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007); SITE Santa Fe, NM (2002); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (1996); Brooklyn Museum, New York (1985); New Museum, New York (1982), Downtown Whitney Museum, New York (1978), Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN (1968); among others.

Hammond’s work is in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, New York; 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; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Her archive is in the permanent collection of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim, Joan Mitchell, Pollock–Krasner, Esther and Adolph Gottlieb, and Art Matters Foundations, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. Hammond’s book, Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts, (TSL Press, 1984) is considered a seminal publication on 1970s feminist art. Her groundbreaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (Rizzoli, 2000) received a Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary text on the subject. In 2013, Hammond was honored with The College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award. She received both the College Art Association's Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and Anonymous was a Woman Award in 2014.

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