Harmony Hammond b. 1944

  • Harmony Hammond, an early leader in the feminist art movement and co-founder of A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York in 1972, incorporates found and repurposed materials such as rags, straw, burnt wood, and hair into her work. These everyday objects, with historical and cultural associations, are wrapped, ripped, bound, and layered by Hammond at the intersection of social struggle and the postminimal focus on materials and process. In addition to being an artist and curator, Hammond is a writer, publishing on feminist and queer theory in art.
  • Exhibitions

  • 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. 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). 

  • Works