Harmony Hammond
Site Santa Fe | 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM
Through May 19
At 81, Hammond is nothing short of a living legend. Since the ’70s, she has helped define the intersection of feminist and queer art discourse, as a co-founder of A.I.R in 1972 (the first nonprofit, cooperative gallery for women artists in the country), and a founding member of the Heresies Collective. (Her essay “Feminist Abstract Art, a Political Viewpoint” was published in the first issue of Heresies magazine, in 1977, prefiguring her still unsurpassed monograph Lesbian Art in America: a Contemporary History, 2000.) Hammond’s important work as a critic, curator, and teacher would be enough for her to stake her claim on American art history, but there is still more than a half-century of genre-defying, mixed-media paintings, sculptures, and installations to account for—a body of work that has challenged masculinist, Eurocentric hierarchies of craft and labor with its influential use of domestic materials. Early in her career, Hammond used woven and braided textiles as a formal means to address women’s and, particularly, queer women’s experience. And, while she has advocated strongly for the political importance of representational and figurative work, her most significant contribution has been her pursuit of this content through abstract form.
The paintings here, in “FRINGE,” appear more or less the same: large rectangular canvases that have been covered with swaths of burlap (sometimes in central cross shapes) or clad with strips as though bandaged. These textiles are submerged and affixed upon the surface in layer upon layer of dense, full-bodied oil paint in a range of off-whites, sometimes dipping into rust or tan, punctuated by simmering near-blacks and bright, pulsing scarlets. And generally, the works’ visual structures marry modernist grids with tufted quilts. But, seeing a large selection of these recent, strikingly minimal paintings (this exhibition constitutes roughly a third of her output of the last decade) allows the subtle differences between them—and their deeper meaning as a group—to emerge.
Paintings in general demand our looking closely, but this kind of abstraction does so more adamantly, insisting that we observe exactly what’s there. One way to start is by attending to how each part touches the others—and the surface to which it is affixed. Sometimes the elements overlap, or just abut, or leave a zone between them—the strips will go right up to the outer edge of the stretcher bar, extending beyond it in a kind of frozen frill, or they will withdraw from it like a wave retreating from the shore. Noticing such specificity sensitizes the edges of everything—between the parts of the painting and the whole, and between the painting and the world, the wall it’s on, the room it's in, and the bodies of those looking at it. And in precisely this way, Hammond and her paintings know there is no clean place to cleave our knowledge of the work from our larger knowledge of the world; it is only a move of violent ideology that separates things into distinct categories like "life" and "art." Which is to say, Hammond’s paintings ask us to bring our whole selves—every aspect of our senses, associations, and memories are relevant to our experience of them.
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Read full review at culturedmag.com.
