Neal Baer Collection

Harmony Hammond (b. 1944, Hometown, Illinois) attended the University of Minnesota from 1963–67, studying abstract painting, before moving to New York in 1969, where she was a co-founder of A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York (1972) and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics (1976). This early work is part of Hammond’s earliest series combining gender politics with post-Minimal concerns of materials and process, frequently occupying a space between painting and sculpture.

These pieces, particularly the bags, have a quality which suggests Oldenburg’s early Street pieces: an apparent colorlessness and formlessness which obscures their relationship to real objects, making possible a more abstract, raw kind of strength. Hammond’s smaller bags and baskets question the distinction between fine art and primitive craft by affirming, once more, the ability of “crafted” objects to convey presence. (They also attest to the fact that she, not just the Indians, can make exquisite baskets.) Her larger pieces refer to a much deeper kind of primitivism. They are chaotic and obsessive in their formation and thus removed from craft and function to a ritualistic, mysterious level of primitivism. On still another level, the bags and garments seem very much involved with painting, with the accumulation of marks on surfaces and with a peculiar beauty which, although seen most openly in the painted paper bag collages, is present in most of Hammond’s work.

– Roberta Pancoast Smith, Artforum, Vol. 11, No. 8, 1973

Abstract paintings done on supermarket bags and festooned with ragged strips of cloth, they’re like urban medicine pouches. Among their other virtues, they gave the kiss-off term “bag lady,” much in use in the depressed city of that time,  a whole new meaning, a new power. Part of the power lies in the impression these paintings give of having a hidden content, something inside you can’t see.  

– Holland Cotter, “Art in Review: Harmony Hammond,” the New York Times, November 14, 2013

As Lucy Lippard wrote of Hammond’s fabric works in 1981, “these figures were full—of women’s history, of the dignity of lost lives. The strips of rag and painted tunic-like panels seemed both elegantly ornamental and homely, worn by use or survival, layered into an accretion of energy from the past.”

Provenance

Alexander Gray Associates

See also

Harmony Hammond “Bag” work in the collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art

Harmony Hammond archive at the Getty Research Center

Harmony Hammond’s website

List of Works by Harmony Hammond in Public Collections

Harmony Hammond in the collection of the MoMA

Harmony Hammond in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art

Harmony Hammond at Alexander Gray

“Harmony Hammond: Material Witness, Five Decades of Art,” The Aldrich, March 3 – September 15, 2019