Harmony Hammond exhibition at SITE SANTA FE
SITE SANTA FE launches an eventful 2025 with a solo exhibition by feminist icon Harmony Hammond. Hammond’s deceptively simple, near-monochrome paintings generate a robust dialogue between marginalized voices and the traditions of modernist abstraction. As a leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in the 1970s, Hammond forged a commitment to reclaiming abstraction for gendered politics that still animates her practice.
By incorporating found textiles and materials linked to “women’s work” into her paintings, Hammond seeks to topple hierarchies of fine art and craft, reclaiming the domestic arts’ rightful place in the history of abstraction. Organized by Brandee Caoba, Curator, with Samantha Manion-Chavez, Curatorial Assistant, SITE SANTA FE’s exhibition features a focused selection of Hammond’s work from the past ten years.
The exhibition’s title, FRINGE, on view February 28 through May 19, 2025, highlights the metaphoric potential of Hammond’s formalist yet avidly handmade work. She is drawn to the periphery over the mainstream and prompts viewers to contemplate the creative energy that resides in outer limits.
“I think of it as a kind of survivor aesthetic: one of rupture, suture, and endurance,” Hammond has said.
Edges have long been a feature of her work across media, and her paintings are built up from pieces of frayed cloth drawn from non-traditional sources—burlap sacks, historic flags, and old quilts layered with meaning. Visibly deteriorating, they are salvaged and stabilized through the addition of paint as an adhesive or binder, along with straps, grommets, and lengths of cord that reinforce attachment and connectivity.
“Harmony Hammond’s use of materials and techniques is not only aesthetic, but symbolic,” Caoba said. “The works in FRINGE bear the marks of struggle, mending, and repair, pressing us to confront, to question, and to remember the resilience of those pushed to the margins. They trace threads of collective memory that resist erasure and hold the weight of history—at a moment when critical thought becomes an act of survival and resistance.”
The artist’s material vocabulary and physical activity (of piecing, patching, bandaging, and grommeting) implies a bodily presence, which seems to haunt her non-figurative paintings below the surface. Layers of reddish color that underlie the bone, buff, and ochre palette she favors suggest wounded flesh beneath the skin of paint, unsettling the logic and order of a neutral grid structure with pigment that oozes from fissures in the picture plane. Fragments of fabrics, quilts, and bandages intended to cover the body simultaneously expose its inherent vulnerability.
Her recent series of Chenilles, Bandaged Grids, and Cross Paintings imply certain intersections and accumulations (as well as themes of religious belief or humanitarian and medical aid). Patched is a red-stained quilt of open sores, created in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The tears and folds of Hammond’s paintings have a visceral quality that can evoke bodily peril. “
It’s about what’s hidden,” she has said, “what’s revealed, buried, muffled, pushing up from underneath.”
ABOUT HARMONY HAMMOND
Harmony Hammond (b. 1944) is an artist, writer, and curator. A leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s, she was a co-founder of A.I.R. (1972)—the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York—and of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics (1976).
Since 1984, Hammond has lived and worked in Northern New Mexico, teaching at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1989 through 2006. Her earliest feminist work combined gender politics with Post-Minimal concerns of materials and process, frequently occupying a space between painting and sculpture. For years, she has worked with found and repurposed materials as a means of introducing content to the world of abstraction.
ABOUT SITE SANTA FE
SITE SANTA FE is a dynamic, interdisciplinary contemporary arts institution guided by artists, rooted in New Mexico. Always placing artists at the center, SITE SANTA FE collaborates with a diverse range of artists to explore extraordinary ideas through innovative exhibitions and programs. SITE SANTA FE sits at the intersection of cultures and ideas, bridging local, regional, national, and international artistic communities, serving as a forum for creative expression and experimentation.
