Harmony Hammond: Material Witness: Five Decades of Art - Hardcover

Smith-Stewart, Amy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1941366236 ISBN 13: 9781941366233

Publisher: Gregory R. Miller & Co./The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2019

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

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. (Ashton Cooper Artforum)

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. (Holland Cotter New York Times)

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. (Meredith Mendelsohn Brooklyn Rail)

Harmony Hammond’s work can appear bewildering at first, expansive in its diametrical explorations, and sprawling in its material juxtapositions. (Sharmistha Ray Hyperallergic)

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. (Rachel Churner 4Columns)

[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. (Faye Hirsch Art in America)

In these works [...] Hammond's advocation for resistance and female strength in life and art is a message conveyed with boy ferocity and grace. (Spike Art Magazine)

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. (Allison C. Meier AFAR)

[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. (Evan Moffit Frieze)

About this edition

• Publisher: Gregory R. Miller & Co./The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1941366236
• ISBN 13: 9781941366233
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 142