An Interview with Harmony Hammond
March 6, 2011
Harmony’s Studio in Galisteo, New Mexico
Harmony Hammond: My name is Harmony Hammond. We are in my studio in Galisteo, New Mexico where I have lived and worked since 1989, although I moved to New Mexico in 1984. It’s a base from which I engage with different communities. I was a member of the Galisteo Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department for ten years, fought against oil and gas drilling in the Galisteo Basin, and I’m now involved with bosque restoration along the Galisteo Creek. I am active as an artist, curator and critic in the local Santa Fe arts community, as well as national, bicoastal, intergenerational feminist, and queer art communities. I move between these different groups pretty comfortably.
I helped found the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s, contributing to and benefiting from the incredible energy that existed at that time. There was a sense of excitement, of making something happen, of creating change. Since then, I have continued making work, writing, teaching, lecturing and contributing to various feminist, lesbian and queer art projects over the years.
Carlos Motta: Where did you grow up?
HH: I grew up in Chicago.
CM: Did you identify as a lesbian as a teenager?
HH: No, I didn’t. I grew up in a post-war, lower middle-class housing project; it was all about sameness - row upon row of duplexes. I lived on Main Street in “Hometown.” Luckily, I had an unusual name. I stayed there until I was nineteen and married in order to leave home. I never questioned my sexual identity. At age seventeen I attended Milliken University, a small church school in Decatur, Illinois the soybean capital of the United States because my parents did not want me to go to a big university. That’s where I met Stephen Clover, also an art student, whom I eventually married. He was a year older and from Minnesota, so we moved to Minneapolis and enrolled at the University of Minnesota. This is when my queer personal history began because Steve was gay, but struggling with his sexuality. I did not know. This was the early 1960s, pre gay liberation.
CM: During your marriage did you have any contact with sexually diverse people that had already assumed their sexuality?
HH: Sure, I hung out in gay bars and shopped in gay male clothing stores with Steve. I wore faux leather pants and t-shirts with the sleeves rolled up like Jimmy Dean. I hung out with the boys.
CM: What about with women?
HH: Not really. To be honest, I didn’t have a clue of what was going on. Steve drank, was in therapy trying to deal with his sexuality and eventually came out to me. He thought he was ill and I thought if I could just be a better wife, it would all be okay, and he would get over his illness. This was a very difficult period for both of us because it was pre-gay liberation and there was no support structure. I read Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers and focused on my artwork. Painting is what got me through it all. Steve was a good person (I say was, because he died from AIDS in the late 1980s); we just should never have been married.
The whole scene was erotically charged. To answer your question, I would hang out with Steve and the boys at their parties. There were some women around - heavy-duty diesel dykes and a few women who passed as men. They thought if he is, then she is, and I was — but didn’t know it. They definitely fascinated me but I never questioned my own sexuality. Hanging out with gay men was safe.
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Read full interview and watch video at wewhofeeldifferently.info.
