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Harmony Hammond

Floorpiece II, 1973 (detail), Cloth and acrylic

Harmony Hammond is included in the group exhibition, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, on view from November 8, 2024–March 2, 2025. 

The National Gallery of Canada's press release follows:

This transformative exhibition explores how abstract art and woven textiles have intertwined over the past hundred years.

In the 20th century, textiles were often considered lesser – as applied art, women’s work, or domestic craft. Woven Histories challenges the hierarchies that have separated textiles from fine arts. Putting into dialogue some 130 works by more than 45 creators from across generations and continents, the exhibition explores the contributions  weaving and related techniques have made to abstraction, modernism’s pre-eminent art form.  

See a variety of textile techniques including weaving, knitting, netting, knotting and felting. Learn about the wide-ranging reasons artists from Anni Albers to Rosemarie Trockel and Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee Nation) have engaged with this art form. Some seek to effect social change; others address political issues. Engaging with textiles as subject, material and technique, still others revitalize abstraction’s formal conventions or critique its patriarchal history and gendered identity. 

Follow this hidden thread of art history to discover the work of creators who were once marginalized for their gender, race or class. 

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.