Harmony Hammond 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 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 worked in northern New Mexico, teaching at the University of Arizona, Tucson from 1989–2006. Her groundbreaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000) received a Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary text on the subject. Hammond’s earliest feminist work combined gender politics with post-minimal concerns of materials and process, frequently occupying a space between painting and sculpture. She often combines fabric (what she labels as feminine materials) with non-art materials (e.g., hair, roofing) and paint.

Working in series since the 1980s, Hammond’s monotypes represent an extension of her interest in materials and processes to push the boundaries of traditional printmaking. Viewing the press as a collaborator, Hammond works in a “state of peripheral control,” or intentional unpredictability, allowing the pressure of the press to move the ink and activate the surface. By applying layers of wet-into-wet ink printed on handmade paper, she imbues these works with a sculptural quality and textured surface that recalls that of patinated metal, skin, and leather.