Jerome Nerman Lecture Series: Harmony Hammond

Guest artist Harmony Hammond will speak at 7 p.m. February 6 in the Jerome Nerman Lecture Series hosted by the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art on the JCCC campus. The program is free and open to the public. No tickets or reservations are required.

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Harmony Hammond

The public is invited to listen to guest artist Harmony Hammond speak about her experiences as one of the leaders in the feminist art movement from the early 1970s to today. Her work is featured in “queer abstraction,” currently on view at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art through March 8. Prior to her presentation, there will be a reception in the Museum Atrium from 6-7 p.m.

Hammond was co-founder of A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York City, and the journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics. Since 1984, Hammond has lived and worked in northern New Mexico and taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Her earliest feminist work used painting and sculpture to address gender politics. She has worked with found and repurposed materials and objects such as rags, straw, latex, hair, burned wood, buckets and gutters. Her near-monochrome paintings of the last two decades are described as modernist abstraction focused on feminist and queer content.

Hammond’s work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally and is represented in many important public and private permanent collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. In 2019, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, presented “Harmony Hammond: Material Witness, Fifty Years of Art,” a survey exhibition of Hammond’s work. Her archive is in the permanent collection of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim, Joan Mitchell, Pollock–Krasner, Esther and Adolph Gottlieb and Art Matters Foundations, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. Hammond’s book Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts is a foundational publication on 1970s feminist art. Her groundbreaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History received a Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary text on the subject.

In 2013, Hammond was honored with The College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award. The following year, she received the College Art Association’s Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award.

The Jerome Nerman Lecture Series was generously endowed by Central Bank of Kansas City and the Tutera Family.