Harmony Hammond

Profile

Harmony Hammond is an artist, art writer and independent curator who lives and works in Galisteo, New Mexico. Considered a pioneer of the feminist art movement, she lectures, writes and publishes extensively on painting, feminist art, lesbian art, and the cultural representation of “difference”.

Hammond attended the University of Minnesota from 1963-67 (B.A., 1967). In 1969, she moved to Manhattan, where she was a co-founder of A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York (1972) and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics (1976). In 1984, she moved to New Mexico. As Professor of Art, she taught painting, combined media and interdisciplinary graduate critique seminars at the University of Arizona (Tucson) for seventeen years (1989-2006). Last summer she was the senior artist advisor at the Terra Foundation in Giverny, France. Currently she mentors MFA students at Vermont College, and is a Visiting Artist in programs such as: Skowhegan, Anderson Ranch, California College of Arts and the Vermont Studio School. In 2013, the College Art Association honored her with the Distinguished Feminist Award.

Hammond has had over 40 solo exhibitions and her work has been shown internationally in venues such as: the New Museum, the National Academy Museum, the Downtown Whitney Museum, and White Columns in NYC; the Brooklyn Museum and Smack Mellon Studios in Brooklyn; the Bronx Museum; P.S. 1 MoMA Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens; the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, D.C.; the Tucson Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Phoenix Art Museum; Site Santa Fe, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe; the Vancouver Art Gallery; the American Center, in Paris; the Neue Galerie, in Graz, Germany; the Gementemuseum Den Hague in The Hague; the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Havana; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Internacional Rufino Tamayo, the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Frieze New York, and the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts. “Against Seamlessness”, Hammond’s solo exhibition at Dwight Hackett projects, Santa Fe (2011), was accompanied by a signed limited edition catalog published by Radius Books. Her work has been represented by Alexander Gray Associates in NYC. Her next solo exhibition will be at Alexander Gray (October 23 – December 14, 2013).

Her work was included in “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975” (2006) and “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” (2007) two major historical survey exhibitions that traveled to venues in the United States, Canada, Europe and Mexico. In addition to catalogs for the above exhibitions, Hammond’s work has been reproduced and discussed in, Art in America, Art Forum, Art News, Art Papers, Art on Paper, The Art Journal, Arts Magazine, the New Art Examiner, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and the internet journal Times Quotidian. Most recently, it has been featured in “Queerly Made: Harmony Hammond’s Floorpieces,” by Julia Bryan-Wilson in the Journal of Modern Craft 2:1; String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art by Elissa Auther; Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art by Katy Siegel, and Art & Homosexuality: A History of Ideas by Christopher Reed.

Hammond’s work is represented in the permanent collections of many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Brooklyn Museum; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Phoenix Art Museum; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb, Joan Mitchell, Andrea Frank, Puffin, and Pollock-Krasner Foundations,Art Matters, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Hammond’s book Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts, (TSL Press, 1984), a classic on 70s feminist art, is out-of-print. Her groundbreaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (Rizzoli, 2000), also out-of-print, received a Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary text on the subject. Currently she is the Santa Fe Correspondent for Art in America.