Harmony Hammond

A leading figure in the feminist art movement of 1970s New York, Harmony Hammond creates hybrid painting-sculptures that combine paint and mixed media, displaying Post-Minimalist concerns with materials and process. In her early work, Hammond worked with discarded and waste materials like straw, hair, buckets, and burnt wood. More recently she has produced bronze sculptures, digital prints, and near-monochrome paintings that address modernist abstraction, as well as queer and feminist themes. In Flap (2008–11), which Hammond made with oil paint and mixed media on canvas, the surface of the work is built up and a horizontal seam runs though the center, suggesting a topography of the female body and pointing to ideas of dressing and undressing. Hammond was a cofounder of A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York.