Harmony Hammond, 2021. Photo by Grace Roselli
Harmony Hammond, 82, is the rare figure to have both earned renown as a contemporary artist and had a hand in how the movements of her time are remembered in art history. Her sculptures and canvases have given textiles a new remit in the world of abstraction, while her texts—Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History and Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts among them—remain unparalleled in their juxtaposition of identity politics, art criticism, and feminism as a lived experience.
A volume dedicated to her life in words, Still Dangerous! The Harmony Hammond Reader, will release this August, and her seventh solo exhibition with Alexander Gray Associates, “Rust Never Sleeps,” will open June 5 in the gallery’s new Tribeca space.
We’re going to speak a good deal about the past and the arc of your career. But I’m wondering if you can tell me what you’re sitting with these days. What are you working on? What are you mulling over?
I’m glad that we can deal a little bit with the present, because I get very tired of talking about the ’70s as I am alive and working today for better or worse. I’m extremely busy with exhibitions, some that have been important ahistorical and transnational exhibitions. A lot have been focusing on the history of textile in relationship to modernist painting. I’m thinking of the “Woven Histories” exhibition that Lynne Cook curated. There was also “Unravel,” which opened at the Barbican then traveled to the Stedelijk Museum. It’s interesting that the word is now textile. In the ’70s, we talked about fabric and cloth, not textile. I just see this all as a really great, long overdue conversation.
And now, I’m getting ready for a show in New York at Alexander Gray. I’m busy trying to finish work, because I guess I work slowly compared to some other artists. Alex, my dealer, jokes about it and says, “artists who work slowly like you,” and I go, “I don’t work slowly, I’m always working.” It takes a long time because I work with materials and process; I don’t start from a sketch or something. The practice of making the work evolves out of the handling of the materials. There are threads of concerns and ideas in the work, but I don’t really know where I’m going when I start out. It keeps me engaged and on my toes, but it also takes time. I also tend to work with very layered materials, specifically what looks like thick oil paint. It’s not about putting down a thick surface all at one time; it is very much about notions of accumulation and layering. This notion of accumulation over time gets performed through the materials in my process.
Aside from the painting practice, we’re very involved with the last stages of Still Dangerous! The Harmony Hammond Reader the Duke University Press is publishing this fall. It’s a compilation of all kinds of texts, articles or interviews or lectures or artist statements from exhibition as well as unpublished material. I think there’s a real audience for the volume. I can’t tell you how frequently I get inquiries, especially from art historians who are doing their dissertations on my work, or my work in conjunction with several other artists whose works are involved with similar issues. They’re writing new histories, and we need that all the time—new ideas, new readings. Otherwise it’s just history.
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