Political discourse has all the time flowed freely in Harmony Hammond’s artwork. Hammond arrived in New York in 1969, months after the Stonewall riots rocked Greenwich Village. Towards the backdrop of the homosexual liberation and ladies’s liberation actions, she got here of age as an artist whereas attending consciousness-raising conferences and collaborating within the founding of A.I.R. Gallery, the primary women-run nonprofit artist cooperative in the US. After popping out in 1973, Hammond turned an outspoken proponent of lesbian feminism, coediting the 1977 problem of Heresies devoted to lesbian artwork, and curating “A Lesbian Present” on the artist-run venue 112 Greene Avenue in 1978. A long time later, she actually wrote the ebook on the topic: Lesbian Artwork in America: A Up to date Historical past, printed by Rizzoli in 2000.
Over the past 5 a long time, Hammond has cast a materially acutely aware and process-oriented vocabulary that mobilizes modernist formalism to political ends. Within the ’70s, she integrated material remnants right into a radical physique of textile-based work (like her “Floorpieces” from 1973) and sculptures (resembling Hunkertime 1979–80) that drew upon traditions related to girls, the home sphere, and non-Western cultures. Encoded within the language of abstraction, sociopolitical considerations proceed to determine in Hammond’s current work. Working by means of emblematic processes—together with binding, tearing, piecing, patching, and suturing—on virtually monochromatic surfaces, work resembling Patched (2022) and Double Cross I (2021) warning towards patterns of violence, and cipher collectivity for disenfranchised voices.
A defining voice in modern feminist and queer abstraction, Hammond has obtained her due lately: In 2019 the Aldrich Up to date Artwork Museum held a 50-year survey of her work and, final yr, she was included within the Whitney Biennial. “FRINGE,” a not too long ago opened solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe on view till Could 19, focuses on work produced since 2014, together with her collection of “Bandaged Grids,” “Chenilles,” “Bandaged Quilts,” and “Crosses.” A.i.A. spoke with Hammond concerning the processes and materials metaphors which have characterised her apply from the Nineteen Seventies to in the present day.
“FRINGE,” the title of your SITE Santa Fe present, could be learn quite a lot of other ways. What does it connote to you?
It’s a verb and a noun. The thought of fringe and fringing has to do with edges and marginalized areas. Going again to the Nineteen Seventies, the metaphorical associations of edges as assembly factors have me and been essential to the formal methods that I make use of. Are individuals pushed to the fringes, or do they select to be there? How do issues or individuals meet at these edges? Is there a stress, a friction, a negotiation? The perimeter isn’t just a passive place. In truth, it is extremely lively and charged. It’s the place that I select to occupy.
Concord Hammond.
Picture Clayton Porter
Layers and what’s hidden beneath are recurrent themes in your work. How are you excited about visibility and opacity?
I’m skilled as a painter. I work through accumulation. From my material work of the ’70s to the work I do now, it’s additive. Whether or not you name it portray or sculpture, that’s what I do. In my early “Baggage” and “Presences,” the hanging strips of paint-saturated fabric are three-dimensional brushstrokes. Accumulation over time, over area—that sense of constructing from the within out—may be very a lot about company and occupying area.
The works of the final 15 years exist in a 3rd area between portray and sculpture. They construct up paint slowly and intimately in thick, near-monochrome layers. The portray turns into a metaphor for the physique. There was a interval the place the work had been a darkish phthalo blue, at instances wanting black or iridescent. The colour and floor had been fugitive, or what we might name queer. Latest work are largely lighter in colour, emphasizing floor incident. Lumps, bumps, protrusions, seams, splits, stains, and grommet holes formally open up the pictorial area. On the identical time, they counsel physique orifices, or wounds, with the paint appearing as a therapeutic poultice. Once I wrap a portray, the straps usually wrap across the edges to the again. You may consider that as bandaging, binding, bondage, however it’s also embracing the portray. It’s about strengthening—like an athlete bandaging a knee.
Concord Hammond: Double Cross I, 2021.
Courtesy the Artist
How do floor and texture think about?
In my current work, mild and shadow are essential. The surfaces are very a lot in reduction—fascinating phrases!—returning to the concept of edges. Once I consider edges in portray, I don’t simply consider the perimeter; I additionally consider the portray floor as an edge between artwork and life, these bumps pushing up from beneath, seams splitting open, or what appears to be like like physique fluids oozing out of the holes. I’m considering conceptually concerning the underlayers of paint and colour. I’m actually occupied with what’s buried and asserting itself onto or by means of the highest floor. The shadows should be there, as do the material’s seams and unfastened threads. Seams are connectors. I just like the connections to be seen. It’s what I name a “survivor aesthetic,” making a complete out of items.
All these visible methods have that means connected to them. I’m utilizing the supplies and the way they’re manipulated to deliver social and political content material into the work, which is definitely fairly formal. For instance, a bit of cloth that’s reduce has a special feeling than one which’s torn and fraying. Supplies have histories and reminiscences, whether or not they’re conventional artwork supplies or what we’d name nonart supplies.
The metaphorical relationship between materials and idea is prime in your work. How are you working with language?
Phrases come and go in my work. I largely use them to counsel connections or to inform a narrative that must be informed. However I additionally use phrases in relation to numerous visible methods. For instance, in my collection “Bandaged Grids,” I affix bandages over a grid of holes that counsel wounds. The material strips that bandage the portray physique are largely horizontal. Once I take a look at these, I usually consider them as sentences—phrases overlaying up and over. Within the “Double Cross” work, doubling is about sameness and distinction—and, due to this fact, queer need. However “double cross” additionally suggests betrayal. I’m taking part in with phrases. I take advantage of visible imagery with that means connected to it in the identical method that we connect that means to textual content.
In my summary work, voices assert themselves from beneath the floor pores and skin of paint. To me, that’s a political assertion. However there are occasions I do a bit that’s extra overtly political. There are a couple of of those works within the SITE exhibition—Bandaged Flag (2021), Patched (2022), or Voices I (2023). Voices I, for instance, consists of items of classic linoleum with fragmented quotes from the French lesbian feminist author Monique Wittig, one in every of which asks, “what have you ever executed with our need?” Each methods of working are about the identical factor: voice, censorship, company.
Concord Hammond: Patched, 2022.
Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, New York
From the ’70s by means of the ’90s, you created sculptures knowledgeable by an additive sensibility. That dimensionality remains to be in your present work, however there may be additionally a dialogue with modernist portray. What do you see because the continuities between these our bodies of labor?
Within the early ’70s, content material that mirrored the lives and experiences of ladies was not welcome within the portray area. Many feminist artists stopped portray and started to work with supplies and methods that mirrored girls’s lives and traditions of creativity. That’s once I started to work extensively with material, absorbing, embracing, and flaunting traditions of weaving, needlework, and the artwork of non-Western cultures.
My early material works had been unstretched—I used to be portray on blankets, sheets, and curtains hanging push-pinned to the wall, the load of the acrylic-saturated material altering the portray rectangle. Regularly they moved off the wall into area and I noticed that I used to be a painter making what individuals name sculpture. Once I titled the sculptures “Presences,” I used to be deliberately claiming the notion of presence as essence made seen, in opposition to Michael Fried’s gendered theorization and dismissal of that time period. A whole lot of my work at the moment needed to do with girls taking and occupying area. Once I speak about presence, even within the work I do in the present day, I’m speaking about work that occupies an area bigger than its bodily area. Going again to the ’70s, that’s paralleled in an early girls’s motion phrase: “The private is political.”
And people processes turned the premise for a brand new modernist framework?
In 1974 I started a collection of “Weave Work,” that introduced gendered traditions of woven fabric again into the portray area alone phrases. The surfaces of those stretched canvases had been slowly constructed up with layers of oil paint combined with Dorland’s wax medium. I then incised herringbone or braided “weave” patterns into the highest layer, slicing into the pores and skin of paint to disclose underlying colour. The paint wasn’t utterly dry whereas I labored, inflicting little factors of paint to protrude. These had been barely menacing, but additionally fragile, and mirrored the portray’s irregular contour. From a distance, the work appeared monochrome, however up shut, the below colours confirmed by means of. The “weave” work anticipated lots of the considerations in my present work—collaborating within the modernist narrative of abstraction and, on the identical time, difficult or interrupting it with political and social content material.
