I am the kind of art historian who cannot detach the artwork from the person who made it: the body of the art is entwined with the body of the artist, a body that exists in a certain time and place, pursues certain desires, and experiences certain failures. While this attachment is well understood and accepted today, it would not have been taken very seriously when Harmony Hammond first emerged as an artist in the early 1970s, a moment still suffering from the bitter aftertaste of Clement Greenberg’s mid-century formalism. But through her work as an artist, writer, and curator, Hammond has always advocated for lesbian art and identity. In the 1970s alone, she co-founded the women-run AIR gallery (1972), co-edited the Lesbian Art & Artists issue of the feminist magazine Heresies (1977), and curated the iconic lesbian art show A Lesbian Show (1978). In 2000, Hammond published the Lesbian Art in America book, a culmination of years of research, commitment to her community, and a critical resource for any scholar pursuing research on the topic—such as myself.
Over the last two decades, Hammond has largely retreated from her curatorial and writing efforts, instead focusing on her own artistic practice. Her current solo show Accumulations at Alexander Gray presents a series of new paintings from the last three years that speak to her continued dedication to material and process.
To Hammond, the canvas is a body. Created through an immersive procedure of layering paint, burlap, and repurposed linen, the works adorning the walls of the large open gallery appear at once painterly and sculptural. Continuing Hammond’s series of “Chenilles” a reference to her use of textiles, Chenille #11 (2020–2021) and Chenille #12 (2021) are representative of the artist’s signature use of fabric straps, burlap patches, and grommets. The skin-like surface comes to resemble a bandaged body, parts of it stitched together, orifices oozing. Yet as much as these gestures imply the aftermath of violence, they also connote healing; both wound and scab. The gestures of repetition are at once destructive and reparative. Unlike the punctures and slashes deployed by male artists such as Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana, Hammond’s grommet holes are transitional spaces, passageways that create an effect more meaningfully in dialogue with the work of artists such as Eva Hesse and Lee Bontecou.
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