Harmony Hammond, Feminist Icon, on Adapting a “Survivor Aesthetic”

Political discourse has always flowed freely in Harmony Hammond’s art. Hammond arrived in New York in 1969, months after the Stonewall riots rocked Greenwich Village. Against the backdrop of the gay liberation and women’s liberation movements, she came of age as an artist while attending consciousness-raising meetings and participating in the founding of A.I.R. Gallery, the first women-run nonprofit artist cooperative in the United States. After coming out in 1973, Hammond became an outspoken proponent of lesbian feminism, coediting the 1977 issue of Heresies dedicated to lesbian art, and curating “A Lesbian Show” at the artist-run venue 112 Greene Street in 1978. Decades later, she literally wrote the book on the subject: Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History, published by Rizzoli in 2000.

Over the last five decades, Hammond has forged a materially conscious and process-oriented vocabulary that mobilizes modernist formalism to political ends. In the ’70s, she incorporated fabric remnants into a radical body of textile-based paintings (like her “Floorpieces” from 1973) and sculptures (such as Hunkertime 1979–80) that drew upon traditions associated with women, the domestic sphere, and non-Western cultures. Encoded in the language of abstraction, sociopolitical concerns continue to figure in Hammond’s recent paintings. Working through emblematic processes—including binding, tearing, piecing, patching, and suturing—on almost monochromatic surfaces, paintings such as Patched (2022) and Double Cross I (2021) caution against patterns of violence, and cipher collectivity for disenfranchised voices.

A defining voice in contemporary feminist and queer abstraction, Hammond has received her due in recent years: In 2019 the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum held a 50-year survey of her work and, last year, she was included in the Whitney Biennial. “FRINGE,” a recently opened solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe on view until May 19, focuses on work produced since 2014, including her series of “Bandaged Grids,” “Chenilles,” “Bandaged Quilts,” and “Crosses.” A.i.A. spoke with Hammond about the processes and material metaphors that have characterized her practice from the 1970s to today.

“FRINGE,” the title of your SITE Santa Fe show, can be read a number of different ways. What does it connote to you?

It’s a verb and a noun. The idea of fringe and fringing has to do with edges and marginalized spaces. Going back to the 1970s, the metaphorical associations of edges as meeting points have interested me and been crucial to the formal strategies that I employ. Are people pushed to the fringes, or do they choose to be there? How do things or people meet at those edges? Is there a tension, a friction, a negotiation? The fringe is not just a passive place. In fact, it is very active and charged. It’s the place that I choose to occupy.

Layers and what is hidden underneath are recurrent themes in your work. How are you thinking about visibility and opacity?

I’m trained as a painter. I work via accumulation. From my fabric work of the ’70s to the work I do now, it’s additive. Whether you call it painting or sculpture, that’s what I do. In my early “Bags” and “Presences,” the hanging strips of paint-saturated cloth are three-dimensional brushstrokes. Accumulation over time, over space—that sense of building from the inside out—is very much about agency and occupying space.

The works of the last 15 years exist in a third space between painting and sculpture. They build up paint slowly and intimately in thick, near-monochrome layers. The painting becomes a metaphor for the body. There was a period where the paintings were a dark phthalo blue, at times looking black or iridescent. The color and surface were fugitive, or what we could call queer. Recent paintings are mostly lighter in color, emphasizing surface incident. Lumps, bumps, protrusions, seams, splits, stains, and grommet holes formally open up the pictorial space. At the same time, they suggest body orifices, or wounds, with the paint acting as a healing poultice. When I wrap a painting, the straps often wrap around the edges to the back. You can think of that as bandaging, binding, bondage, but it is also embracing the painting. It’s about strengthening—like an athlete bandaging a knee.

How do surface and texture factor in?

In my recent paintings, light and shadow are crucial. The surfaces are very much in relief—interesting words!—returning to the idea of edges. When I think of edges in painting, I don’t just think of the perimeter; I also think of the painting surface as an edge between art and life, those bumps pushing up from underneath, seams splitting open, or what looks like body fluids oozing out of the holes. I’m thinking conceptually about the underlayers of paint and color. I’m really interested in what’s buried and asserting itself onto or through the top surface. The shadows have to be there, as do the fabric’s seams and loose threads. Seams are connectors. I like the connections to be visible. It’s what I call a “survivor aesthetic,” making a whole out of pieces.

All these visual strategies have meaning attached to them. I’m using the materials and how they are manipulated to bring social and political content into the work, which is actually quite formal. For example, a piece of fabric that’s cut has a different feeling than one that’s torn and fraying. Materials have histories and memories, whether they’re traditional art materials or what we would call nonart materials.

The metaphorical relationship between material and concept is fundamental in your work. How are you working with language?

Words come and go in my work. I mostly use them to suggest connections or to tell a story that needs to be told. But I also use words in relation to various visual strategies. For example, in my series “Bandaged Grids,” I affix bandages over a grid of holes that suggest wounds. The fabric strips that bandage the painting body are mostly horizontal. When I look at those, I often think of them as sentences—words covering up and over. In the “Double Cross” paintings, doubling is about sameness and difference—and, therefore, queer desire. But “double cross” also suggests betrayal. I am playing with words. I use visual imagery with meaning attached to it in the same way that we attach meaning to text.

In my abstract paintings, voices assert themselves from underneath the surface skin of paint. To me, that’s a political statement. But there are times I do a piece that is more overtly political. There are a few of these works in the SITE exhibition—Bandaged Flag (2021), Patched (2022), or Voices I (2023). Voices I, for example, is composed of pieces of vintage linoleum with fragmented quotes from the French lesbian feminist writer Monique Wittig, one of which asks, “what have you done with our desire?” Both ways of working are about the same thing: voice, censorship, agency.

From the ’70s through the ’90s, you created sculptures informed by an additive sensibility. That dimensionality is still in your current work, but there is also a dialogue with modernist painting. What do you see as the continuities between these bodies of work?

In the early ’70s, content that reflected the lives and experiences of women was not welcome in the painting field. Many feminist artists stopped painting and began to work with materials and techniques that reflected women’s lives and traditions of creativity. That’s when I began to work extensively with fabric, absorbing, embracing, and flaunting traditions of weaving, needlework, and the art of non-Western cultures.

My early fabric works were unstretched—I was painting on blankets, sheets, and curtains hanging push-pinned to the wall, the weight of the acrylic-saturated fabric altering the painting rectangle. Gradually they moved off the wall into space and I realized that I was a painter making what people call sculpture. When I titled the sculptures “Presences,” I was intentionally claiming the notion of presence as essence made visible, in opposition to Michael Fried’s gendered theorization and dismissal of that term. A lot of my work at that time had to do with women taking and occupying space. When I talk about presence, even in the paintings I do today, I’m talking about work that occupies a space larger than its physical space. Going back to the ’70s, that’s paralleled in an early women’s movement phrase: “The personal is political.”

And those processes became the basis for a new modernist framework?

In 1974 I began a series of “Weave Paintings,” that brought gendered traditions of woven cloth back into the painting field on my own terms. The surfaces of these stretched canvases were slowly built up with layers of oil paint mixed with Dorland’s wax medium. I then incised herringbone or braided “weave” patterns into the top layer, cutting into the skin of paint to reveal underlying color. The paint wasn’t completely dry while I worked, causing little points of paint to protrude. These were slightly menacing, but also fragile, and mirrored the painting’s irregular contour. From a distance, the paintings appeared monochrome, but up close, the under colors showed through. The “weave” paintings anticipated many of the concerns in my current work—participating in the modernist narrative of abstraction and, at the same time, challenging or interrupting it with political and social content.