American, b. 1944
Harmony Hammond is an artist, art writer and independent curator. A leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s, 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). Since 1984, Hammond has lived and worked in northern New Mexico, teaching at the University of Arizona, Tucson from 1989–2006. Hammond’s earliest feminist work combined gender politics with post-minimal concerns of materials and process, frequently occupying a space between painting and sculpture – a focus that continues to this day.
Her near-monochrome paintings of the last two decades participate in the narrative of modernist abstraction at the same time they insist upon oppositional discourses of political content. Often referred to as social abstraction, the paintings which include rough burlap, straps, grommets, and rope, along with Hammonds signature layers of thick paint, engage formal strategies and material metaphors suggesting connection, restraint, agency and voice - a disruption of utopian egalitarian order, but also the possibility of holding together, of healing.
Hammond has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim, Joan Mitchell, Pollock–Krasner, Esther and Adolph Gottlieb and Art Matters Foundations, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2013, She was honored with The College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award. Hammond received both the College Art Association's Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and Anonymous was a Woman Award in 2014.
Her near-monochrome paintings of the last two decades participate in the narrative of modernist abstraction at the same time they insist upon oppositional discourses of political content. Often referred to as social abstraction, the paintings which include rough burlap, straps, grommets, and rope, along with Hammonds signature layers of thick paint, engage formal strategies and material metaphors suggesting connection, restraint, agency and voice - a disruption of utopian egalitarian order, but also the possibility of holding together, of healing.
Hammond has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim, Joan Mitchell, Pollock–Krasner, Esther and Adolph Gottlieb and Art Matters Foundations, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2013, She was honored with The College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award. Hammond received both the College Art Association's Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and Anonymous was a Woman Award in 2014.
