Foreword by Cybele Maylone. Text by Amy Smith-Stewart.
An activist and a curator as well as a trailblazing artist, feminist and lesbian scholar, New Mexico–based Harmony Hammond (born 1944) has enjoyed a career spanning nearly fifty years and many mediums, all of which are brought together for the first time in Material Witness, which accompanies the artist’s museum survey of the same name at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
Hammond’s groundbreaking painting and installation practice unites minimalist and postminimalist concerns with feminist art strategies, employing marginalized craft traditions in the service of abstraction, and working through a wide cast of materials: fabric, rope, pine needles, hair, blood, bone and wood, mixed with traditional sculptural and painting materials.
Harmony Hammond: Material Witness restages the most significant installations of Hammond’s career and presents them alongside her major paintings, sculptures, works on paper and ephemera. Fully illustrated, and with an essay by exhibition curator Amy Smith-Stewart, this is the first and definitive monograph on Harmony Hammond and her revolutionary practice.
"Cinch I" (2011–12) is reproduced from 'Harmony Hammond: Material Witness.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Frieze
Evan Moffit
[In 'Material Witness'] abstraction is a direct invocation of women’s bodies and the work they produce. Intense textures lend her paintings and sculptures an erotic charge; here, surface is a window onto the interior self.
AFAR
Allison C. Meier
Throughout, materials such as burlap, pine needles, bone, hair, blood, charred wood, and linoleum are augmented with paint, bronze, and graphite to elevate women’s craft traditions into reflections of the female body and its strength.
Spike Art Magazine
In these works [...] Hammond's advocation for resistance and female strength in life and art is a message conveyed with boy ferocity and grace.
Art in America
Faye Hirsch
[Material Witness] testifies to Hammond’s status as a productive and rigorous maker who demonstrates a consistent knack for transforming the neutral forms of abstraction into corporeal metaphor.
4Columns
Rachel Churner
Material Witness [...] stresses the variety of materials the artist has used from 1971 to the present, and it emphasizes the metaphorical valences of menstrual blood, hair, rags, straw, rusted tin, and, above all, paint.
Hyperallergic
Sharmistha Ray
Harmony Hammond’s work can appear bewildering at first, expansive in its diametrical explorations, and sprawling in its material juxtapositions.
Brooklyn Rail
Meredith Mendelsohn
In this long-overdue career survey, Harmony Hammond proves, if there were ever any doubt, that abstract art can be politically charged and bursting with content.
New York Times
Holland Cotter
Ms. Hammond’s art has beauty too, but of a prickly, irritant kind: it’s burlap — sometimes sandpaper — as opposed to silk. No surprise that, in a market-driven art world resistant to what can’t be classified and resentful of work that refuses to ingratiate, the spotlight has been a long time coming her way.
Artforum
Ashton Cooper
In Hammond’s formulation, however, abstraction is not a mode of expressing the “real” self or the truths of the unconscious, as had been explained in preceding decades. Rather, abstraction is an explicitly feminist and queer tool for visualizing and exploring the ever-changing textures of subjectivity.
"Presence II" (1971) is reproduced from Harmony Hammond: Material Witness, Five Decades of Art, published to accompany the game-changing septuagenarian's first career retrospective, on view through September 15 at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. "Her visual work, which she refers to as 'the painting body,' radiates a 'felt content' that bridges hard-lived awareness and feminist and queer ideologies with abstract and material concerns," essayist Amy Smith-Stewart writes. "In doing so, Hammond imbues her works with tenderized moments, infused with fingering and fixing, as she deftly juxtaposes, mediates, integrates and interweaves orthodoxly antagonistic forces like art-craft, painting-sculpture, wall-floor, angle-curve, part-whole, self-collective, inside-outside, male-female, to herald a handmade abstract expression that is percipient in its ability to maintain emblematic elasticity. In a century where historical dualities are becoming more fluid, an examination of Hammond's life work feels not only prophetic, but also imperative." To read Holland Cotter's glowing review of the Aldrich show, continue to The New York Times. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9 x 11.5 in. / 142 pgs / 70 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $62 GBP £40.00 ISBN: 9781941366233 PUBLISHER: Gregory R. Miller & Co./The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum AVAILABLE: 7/23/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Harmony Hammond: Material Witness Five Decades of Art
Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co./The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Foreword by Cybele Maylone. Text by Amy Smith-Stewart.
An activist and a curator as well as a trailblazing artist, feminist and lesbian scholar, New Mexico–based Harmony Hammond (born 1944) has enjoyed a career spanning nearly fifty years and many mediums, all of which are brought together for the first time in Material Witness, which accompanies the artist’s museum survey of the same name at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
Hammond’s groundbreaking painting and installation practice unites minimalist and postminimalist concerns with feminist art strategies, employing marginalized craft traditions in the service of abstraction, and working through a wide cast of materials: fabric, rope, pine needles, hair, blood, bone and wood, mixed with traditional sculptural and painting materials.
Harmony Hammond: Material Witness restages the most significant installations of Hammond’s career and presents them alongside her major paintings, sculptures, works on paper and ephemera. Fully illustrated, and with an essay by exhibition curator Amy Smith-Stewart, this is the first and definitive monograph on Harmony Hammond and her revolutionary practice.
