Everything I know about feminist art I’ve learned from Harmony Hammond, and for that, I feel incredibly lucky. Once a week I visit her studio in Galisteo, New Mexico, to do light administrative work. I say “light” because she is a powerhouse of organization, productivity, and focus; she’d do just fine without me hanging around but welcomes my help regardless. That same spirit — a balance of rigor and openness — infuses Hammond’s work as a groundbreaking artist, writer, and curator who has pioneered progressive, expansive thinking about feminist and queer art since the early 1970s.
She was a co-founder of A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York, in 1972, and co-founder of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, in 1976, co-editing and writing for the journal’s third issue “Lesbian Art and Artists.” In 1978, she curated A Lesbian Show, the first exhibition of work by lesbian artists in New York at the artist-run 112 Greene Street Workshop. And in 1999, she curated Out West at Plan B Evolving Arts in Santa Fe, a show that has been revisited at least in part by the New Mexico Museum of Art with a current exhibition of the same name that looks at the contributions of gay and lesbian artists in the Southwest, 1900 to 1969.
Hammond has published numerous articles and essays, always through a fiercely generous feminist art lens. Her book Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts (TSL Press, 1984) is recognized as a foundational text; Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (Rizzoli, 2000) received the Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary publication on the subject. Still Dangerous! The Harmony Hammond Reader, edited by Tirza T. Latimer, is slated for publication by Duke University Press in early 2026.
Now it looks like the mainstream art world might finally be catching up with Hammond, who has been exhibiting for more than six decades. During the past two years, her work has been in more than 15 exhibitions around the globe, including The Whitney Biennial 2024; Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, then traveling to the National Gallery of Canada, and finally to MoMA; and Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, which opened at the Barbican in London and traveling to the Stedelijk Museum.
What follows is a brief interview with Hammond that glimpses her use of materials and the language of abstraction, and offers her perspective on being a feminist and queer artist today.
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