Harmony Hammond
"Ruffled Waters", 1975
Oil crayon on paper
22 x 29 1/2 inches

Selected by Barbara Toll

Harmony Hammond (b. 1944) is an artist, educator, writer, and independent curator. A leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement 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, Hammond has lived and worked in northern New Mexico.

By bending boundaries, Hammond has made her life’s work at the generative crossroads where feminism, Minimalism, process art, and biographical experience intersect, while defiantly resisting all such classifying designations. Her near-monochrome paintings insist on opposing political discourses while still engaging with the story of modernist abstraction. These artworks engage formal strategies and material metaphors suggesting connection, restraint, agency and voice – a disruption of utopian egalitarian order, but also the possibility of holding and healing together.

Hammond’s work is represented by Alexander Gray Associates, NYC. Her work was also  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).