$10 general admission/ $5 members, students

My Life in Art is an annual series of lectures that focuses on significant artists, collectors, patrons, dealers, critics, or other art world luminaries.

Harmony Hammond was 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., 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. Hammond’s earliest feminist work combined gender politics with post-minimal experimentation with materials and process, frequently occupying a space between painting and sculpture. Her near monochrome paintings of the last two decades continue these concerns. Often referred to as social or queer abstraction, the paintings which include rough burlap, straps, grommets and rope along with Hammond’s signature layers of thick paint, engage formal strategies and material metaphors suggesting restraint, connection and liberation. “Harmony Hammond: Material Witness, Five Decades of Art” is on exhibit at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT from March 3 to September 15, 2019.

Holland Cotter is an art critic with the New York Times. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.