“Lesbian erasure is not acceptable,” Hammond told me recently. “We have no choice but to be vigilant.”
Hammond speaks with the conviction of someone who has been fighting for visibility in the art world—and beyond—for a very long time. She is now seeing that activist labor bear fruit on an ever-widening scale, with a survey of her career at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut, pieces in four queer-themed shows across the country this year, and a solo show of recent work at White Cube in London this fall.
“Hammond’s practice has always shown a profound commitment to bending boundaries and showing their radical energy,” said Amy Smith-Stewart, curator of the Aldrich show, entitled “Material Witness, Five Decades of Art,” on view through September 15. “Now that we are seeing historically conditioned binaries imploding and labels around gender becoming increasingly fluid, it’s more evident than ever how prophetic her vision has been from its very onset and how it has evolved and carried through in these last five decades. She pioneered a visual language that confronted gender, class, and sexual orientation within the higher realms of a painterly abstraction, bridging a sentient and materially rich abstraction with an active social awareness.”
Like many feminist artists in the early ’70s, Hammond rejected traditional painting because of its associations with (often toxic) masculinity. Choosing materials that related to women’s creative—frequently domestic—practices such as weaving, she intentionally challenged traditional distinctions between painting and sculpture, as well as art and craft, in what she called “expanded painting,” duking it out with the prominent male artists of the postwar era.
“I hate digital seamlessness,” said Hammond, who is now 75. She typically wears her sleek white hair pulled back, and is partial to cowboy hats. “My work has a survivor aesthetic, which has to do with piecing things together and making something out of nothing. It’s about rupture, suture, and endurance.”
Hammond, who was born and raised in Chicago, married a fellow art student from Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois. They moved to Minneapolis where she studied painting at the University of Minnesota in the early 1960s. In fall 1969, she and her husband moved to New York. It was months after the Stonewall Uprising in June, and downtown Manhattan had become a hotbed of experimental art making, liberation movements, and political activism. Within a year, Hammond separated from her husband, and became involved with the women’s movement.
“The women’s movement changed my life—and my art,” she said.
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