Materializing the Margins: Harmony Hammond’s Feminist Form
Throughout American history, queer artists have been on the fringe of the mainstream art scene. So it’s not uncommon to see us using non-conventional ways to create art to tell our stories. From the methods we use, to the non-conventional materials we create on/with, to how our careers grow and adapt over time. American artists Harmony Hammond’s career is exemplary in showing this innovation.
Hammond’s is a champion of feminist, lesbian, and queer art with a career that has spanned over 6 decades. Throughout this career, she has co-founded galleries, curated ground breaking exhibitions, published books, taught at the collegiate level, and created works of art that have influenced many aspects of the modern art world.
She began her artistic career in 1971 at a time when mainstream art was very straight male dominated, which lead art created by women getting forced to the margins and often considered to be of lesser value. Not only that, but many art forms that were female dominated would be labeled as craft and not art, upholding it lesser value. Hammond challenged this belief system in four series she created between 1971 and 1984. These four series combined aspects of both sculpture and painting. and beyond that, they used a material considered inherently feminine, fabric scraps, collected from female friends and from sweatshops in the garment district of New York City whose workforce was predominantly immigrant women.
Her first series in 1971 Bags featured these scraps stitch together to make sculptures that look like bags. They were decorated with various materials like human hair, pencil shavings, and paint. This series was exhibited along side her second series.
Her second series Presence was created in 1971 and 1972 and features six sculptures. These sculptures hang from the ceiling on wooden coat hangers and use overlapping fabric to create near life-size, vaguely human shapes. Hammond intended for these sculptures to reference women’s creativity and claiming space within the art world.
Her third series in 1973 was Floorpieces, featuring rugs that she created predominantly from the scraps of fabric found in the garment district. These seven pieces represented several topics. The most well known topic is the idea that “craft” is not art”. She used traditional rug-braiding techniques to create these pieces, which more often than not, are seen as a craft over art. Some also believe that they were an ironic commentary on male minimalism at the time. The less discussed topic of their creation is a representation of what Hammond’s view on lesbianism was at the time and the strength the community gains by coming together.
…strands of like kind touching and being woven together for strength…
Harmony Hammond
The fourth and final series using these methods is Wrapped Sculptures, created between 1977 and 1984. As with the previous three she continued to blend the worlds of sculpture and painting. These sculptures are abstract but they represent the female body. The fabric wrapped around a wooden frame is muscle and the paint and latex rubber, the skin.
Their associations with female body parts and orifices… the physical manipulation of materials… conveyed the interior female body—the muscle, tissue, membrane, fluid. Intended to create a lesbian sensual presence in the world, they were not about mummifying, binding, bandaging, or protection, but about making something out of itself from the inside out, with the insides showing on the outside—a kind of presence as essence made visible.
Harmony Hammond, Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (Rizzoli, 2000)
During the late 80’s and 90’s Hammond began to move away from the more sculptural aspects of her work and in turn, coming back to her more traditional painting techniques. That is not to say that she left the non-traditional behind. In 1984, she and her partner and daughter moved to New Mexico and she allowed her surroundings to lead her work. Using unconventional canvases like corrugated steal roof panels, aged linoleum, and wall paper found at abandoned family farms. She would also used scavenged items like gutters and cattle troughs as pieces of her work. Hammond’s work at this time continued to explore sexuality but also began to include the topics of trauma, injury, and the harshness of rural life.
One of the best examples of this is the piece Inappropriate Longing. Hammond created a triptych featuring some of the aged materials from these farms. Her first panel features a floral wallpaper, let in its original state of decay, layered over orange latex rubber. And carved into that rubber are the words “Goddamn Dyke. In panel two she had a piece of age damaged linoleum set in a brown oil paint background and a red paint drop that runs down the canvas. In the third panel she layered the underside on the same aged linoleum and attached a gutter drain that references the female body. And paired with it is a water trough filed with aged and dried leaves. This piece is believed to represent the hate crimes that were happening in Colorado in 1992 after the passing of Amendment 2 which band local and state governments from enacting anti-discrimination polices that would protected members of the LBGTQ+ community.
For the last 20+ years of her career, she has moved almost fully away from the sculpture aspect of her younger years and has moved to creating massive almost monochrome abstract paintings. The series Near Monochromes uses thick paint, burlap fabric, stitching, and other material aspects to create texture and definition with the surface of the paint. Below, you can read part of her artist statement about these artworks and how their interpretation can be vast but is also tied to her queerness.
Despite the thickness of paint—surface, color and space are indeterminate, unstable, fugitive. We can’t quite locate them. They resist definitive articulation. Unlike a lot of monochromes, the paintings refuse to settle down. The painting surface references other materials and substances at the same time it stubbornly remains itself—paint. Color freed from representation, retains referentiality. Dried blood and other body fluids, wounds, scabs and scar tissue, scraped hides, burned, weathered and patinated surfaces, topographical locations. The body is always near.
In their refusal to be any one thing at the same time they are themselves, the paintings can be seen to occupy some sort of fugitive or queer space and in doing so, remain oppositional . . . both in their refusal to participate fully in the received narrative of modernist painting and, at the same time, their refusal to “look” queer (though we might say that the paintings perform queerly).
Throughout her career, Harmony Hammond has fought for visibility, not just for women, but for queer artists as well. From starting her career in the margins, she has proven that fighting for your identity through art can succeed.
To see Harmony Hammond’s art, follow the link below to her website:
http://www.harmonyhammond.com/
