The Getty Research Institute has announced that it has acquired the archive of American artist, writer, curator, and scholar Harmony Hammond. In addition to the archive, which consists of photographs, source material for her art, professional papers, publication drafts, original artwork, and a slide registry devoted to lesbian artists, among other materials, Hammond has donated her library of books and publications related to art, feminism, and LBGTQ studies.
The Harmony Hammond Papers document all stages of her artistic career as well as her role in feminist and lesbian art movements, including her cofounding of A.I.R. Gallery, the nonprofit artist-directed and maintained gallery for women artists in the United States, in 1972.
Highlights from the archive include Hammond’s early works such as a complete set of her editioned prints, two of her earliest paintings, and her personal journals as well as her documentation and correspondence with a range of artists and writers such as Louise Bourgeois, Rita Mae Brown, Judy Chicago, Jill Johnston, Ana Mendieta, Kate Millett, Linda Nochlin, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, May Stevens, and Faith Wilding. “All art participates in multiple narratives,” Hammond said. “I like to think of mine as contributing to both dominant and oppositional discourses.”
Throughout her more than five-decade-long career, Hammond’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum, the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum, PS1 MoMA, Hammer Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Havana. Hammond has authored Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts, 1984, and Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History, 2000, which received a Lambda Literary Award.
“Her life’s work, in every sense possible, has been to document, celebrate, and further the understanding of feminist and LGBTQ art and artists and how issues of difference are manifested in art,” John Tain, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Getty Research Institute, said. “It is this integrated, scholarly practice that makes her archive so instructive and so deeply meaningful.”
