Harmony Hammond

In Conversation with Ksenia M. Soboleva at The Brooklyn Rail
May 22, 2023
Harmony Hammond joins The Brooklyn Rail contributor Ksenia M. Soboleva for a conversation, concluding with a poetry reading by Timmy Straw.

In this talk: 
Visit Harmony Hammond: Accumulations, on view at Alexander Gray Associates through June 24, 2023 →

Harmony Hammond is an artist, art writer and independent curator. A leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s, 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 – a focus that continues to this day. Hammond’s book, Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts (1984), is a foundational publication on 1970s feminist art.

New York-based writer and art historian Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva specializes in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation titled “Fragments: Art, AIDS, and Lesbian Identity in the United States.” Her writings have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, art-agenda, and various exhibition catalogues. She has curated exhibitions at Candice Madey Gallery, La MaMa Galleria, and Assembly Room. Soboleva was the 2020-2021 Jan and Marica Vilcek Curatorial Fellow at the Guggenheim Museum. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and LGBTQ+ History at the New York Historical Society, and Adjunct Professor of Art History at NYU.

Timmy Straw is a poet and translator from Oregon. Their poems appear in Annulet, The Paris Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere, and their first book, The Thomas Salto, comes out on Fonograf Editions in fall 2023. They’re also working with the wonderful Ainsley Morse on a collection of translations of the Russian poet Grigori Dashevsky, and they study comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania.