Political discourse has at all times flowed freely in Harmony Hammond’s artwork. Hammond arrived in New York in 1969, months after the Stonewall riots rocked Greenwich Village. In opposition to the backdrop of the homosexual liberation and girls’s liberation actions, she got here of age as an artist whereas attending consciousness-raising conferences and taking part within the founding of A.I.R. Gallery, the primary women-run nonprofit artist cooperative in the USA. After popping out in 1973, Hammond grew to become an outspoken proponent of lesbian feminism, coediting the 1977 challenge 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 Modern Historical past, printed by Rizzoli in 2000.
During the last 5 many years, Hammond has cast a materially acutely aware and process-oriented vocabulary that mobilizes modernist formalism to political ends. Within the ’70s, she integrated cloth remnants right into a radical physique of textile-based work (like her “Floorpieces” from 1973) and sculptures (corresponding to 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 emblematic processes—together with binding, tearing, piecing, patching, and suturing—on nearly monochromatic surfaces, work corresponding to Patched (2022) and Double Cross I (2021) warning in opposition to patterns of violence, and cipher collectivity for disenfranchised voices.
A defining voice in up to date feminist and queer abstraction, Hammond has acquired her due lately: In 2019 the Aldrich Modern 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 in regards to the processes and materials metaphors which have characterised her observe from the Nineteen Seventies to right now.
“FRINGE,” the title of your SITE Santa Fe present, might be learn plenty of alternative ways. What does it connote to you?
It’s a verb and a noun. The concept 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 folks pushed to the fringes, or do they select to be there? How do issues or folks meet at these edges? Is there a pressure, a friction, a negotiation? The perimeter isn’t just a passive place. Actually, it is extremely energetic and charged. It’s the place that I select to occupy.
Concord Hammond.
Photograph Clayton Porter
Layers and what’s hidden beneath are recurrent themes in your work. How are you serious about visibility and opacity?
I’m skilled as a painter. I work by way of accumulation. From my cloth 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 house—that sense of constructing from the within out—may be very a lot about company and occupying house.
The works of the final 15 years exist in a 3rd house 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 have been a darkish phthalo blue, at occasions trying black or iridescent. The colour and floor have 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 house. On the identical time, they recommend physique orifices, or wounds, with the paint appearing as a therapeutic poultice. After I wrap a portray, the straps usually wrap across the edges to the again. You possibly can consider that as bandaging, binding, bondage, however additionally it is 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 consider?
In my current work, mild and shadow are essential. The surfaces are very a lot in aid—fascinating phrases!—returning to the concept of edges. After 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 seems to be like physique fluids oozing out of the holes. I’m considering conceptually in regards to the underlayers of paint and colour. I’m actually considering what’s buried and asserting itself onto or by the highest floor. The shadows must 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 an entire 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 carry social and political content material into the work, which is definitely fairly formal. For instance, a chunk of material that’s lower has a distinct 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 recommend 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 recommend wounds. The material strips that bandage the portray physique are largely horizontal. After I have a look at these, I usually consider them as sentences—phrases masking up and over. Within the “Double Cross” work, doubling is about sameness and distinction—and, subsequently, queer want. However “double cross” additionally suggests betrayal. I’m taking part in with phrases. I exploit 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 chunk that’s extra overtly political. There are a number 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 all which asks, “what have you ever achieved with our want?” 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 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 girls 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 after I started to work extensively with cloth, absorbing, embracing, and flaunting traditions of weaving, needlework, and the artwork of non-Western cultures.
My early cloth works have been unstretched—I used to be portray on blankets, sheets, and curtains hanging push-pinned to the wall, the load of the acrylic-saturated cloth altering the portray rectangle. Progressively they moved off the wall into house and I noticed that I used to be a painter making what folks name sculpture. After 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. Plenty of my work at the moment needed to do with girls taking and occupying house. After I discuss presence, even within the work I do right now, I’m speaking about work that occupies an area bigger than its bodily house. Going again to the ’70s, that’s paralleled in an early girls’s motion phrase: “The non-public is political.”
And people processes grew to become the idea 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 by myself phrases. The surfaces of those stretched canvases have been slowly constructed up with layers of oil paint blended with Dorland’s wax medium. I then incised herringbone or braided “weave” patterns into the highest layer, chopping into the pores and skin of paint to disclose underlying colour. The paint wasn’t fully dry whereas I labored, inflicting little factors of paint to protrude. These have been barely menacing, but in addition fragile, and mirrored the portray’s irregular contour. From a distance, the work appeared monochrome, however up shut, the below colours confirmed by. The “weave” work anticipated most of the considerations in my present work—taking part within the modernist narrative of abstraction and, on the identical time, difficult or interrupting it with political and social content material.
