Harmony Hammond (b.1944) is an artist, educator, writer, and independent curator. A leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s, she attended the University of Minnesota from 1963–67 before moving to New York in 1969. 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). Since 1984, she has lived and worked in northern New Mexico, teaching at the University of Arizona, Tucson from 1989–2006. Hammond’s earliest feminist work combined gender politics with post-minimal concerns of materials and process, frequently occupying a space between painting and sculpture – a focus that continues to this day.

Her near-monochrome paintings of the last two decades participate in the narrative of modernist abstraction at the same time they insist upon oppositional discourses of political content. Often referred to as social abstraction, the paintings which include rough burlap, straps, grommets, and rope, along with Hammond’s signature layers of thick paint, engage formal strategies and material metaphors suggesting connection, restraint, agency and voice – a disruption of utopian egalitarian order, but also the possibility of holding together, of healing.

Hammond’s work is represented by Alexander Gray Associates, NYC, where she has had six solo exhibitions (2013, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023). In 2019, the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, CT presented Harmony Hammond: Material Witness, Fifty Years of Art, a survey exhibition that traveled to the Sarasota Museum of Art.

Her work was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing and is included in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction organized by the National Gallery of Art, traveling to the Museum of Modern Art, NYC (April 20 – September 13, 2025) and Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art originating at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, traveling to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (September 14, 2024 – January 5, 2025). It was also included in major exhibitions such as Women in Abstraction: Another History of Abstraction (2021 – 2022); Wack! Art and Feminist Revolution (2007); and High Times/Hard Times, New York Painting 1967-1975 (2006-2007).

Photo by: Clayton Porter.
Permission to reproduce this photo must be obtained from Harmony Hammond, Alexander Gray Associates, or Artists Rights Society.