For art enthusiasts, the spring months positively teem with things to do and see. In Manhattan alone, the Armory Show, the Whitney Biennial, and Frieze New York will all jostle for attention between now and June; and that’s to say nothing of high-profile exhibitions like “Camp: Notes on Fashion” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But there are quieter (and more immediate) delights to be had, too—not only in New York, but in Connecticut, Washington D.C., and Ohio, as well. Here, a few museum shows to keep on your radar this March and April, from celebrations of pioneering female artists to a sprawling, multimedia tribute to the late folk singer Leonard Cohen.
Harmony Hammond: Material Witness, Five Decades of Art
With “Material Witness, Five Decades of Art,” the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, will be the first to stage a dedicated survey of artist and writer Harmony Hammond’s work. Since the ’70s, Hammond, now 75, has blazed a trail for queer, feminist artists, curating several group shows and publishing Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (Rizzoli) in 2000. Spanning from 1971 to 2018, “Material Witness” gathers together Hammond’s painted and sculpted pieces—along with works on paper, publications, and ephemera—to fete her significant body of work.
“I moved to New York’s Lower East Side, and then to the corner of Spring and West Broadway in early fall 1969,” Hammond has written. “It was a period of civil rights and antiwar activism, the gay liberation movement, the second wave feminist movement, and the birth of feminist art.” In response to early experimentations with feminist art, Hammond began painting on “blankets, curtains, and bedspreads recycled from women friends,” turning the stuff of life into the bases for her art. “Rag strips dipped in paint and attached to the painting surface hung down like three-dimensional brushstrokes,” she recalled, “their weight altering the painting rectangle. Eventually the rags took over and activated the painting field.” Unusually tactile, pieces like these “could be touched, retouched, repaired, and, like women’s lives, reconfigured,” Hammond reflected. Examples of those works, along with later multimedia compositions and more recent “near monochromes,” will all be on show at the Aldrich. Opens March 3.
