Thursday, Feb. 6, at 7 p.m. The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art presents “The Jerome Nerman Lecture Series” with distinguished feminist artist Harmony Hammond, in the Hudson Auditorium. There will be a reception from 6 to 7 p.m. in the museum atrium. The event is free and open to students, faculty and the general public.
The Jerome Nerman Lecture Series presents one national or international artist in the spring and fall. They are held in the evening to make them more accessible to people in the community who work during the day. Similarly, the “Third Thursday Lecture Series” happens monthly and features two local or regional contemporary artists. It is also free and open to the general public, but is offered in the afternoon when students are on campus.
The Jerome Nerman Lecture Series, named for Jerome Nerman after whom the museum is named, is made possible by the endowment of the Central Bank of Kansas City and the Tutera Family.
Harmony Hammond is a prominent, internationally recognized abstract artist, curator, activist and writer of historical and contemporary significance. She is one of the founders of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s, and currently lives and works in northern New Mexico.
Hammond is a recipient of prestigious fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Pollack-Krasner Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2014, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art.
She has had more than thirty solo exhibitions. Her work is in the permanent museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Wadsworth Atheneum.
In the 1970s Hammond curated the first gay art exhibition in the United States, “The Lesbian Show”, in SoHo, (NY). She co-founded the “A.I.R Gallery” exhibition space, co-founded “Heresies Collective” and co-edited “Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics” published from 1977 to 1992. It took her 10 years to write “Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History” which was first published in 2000.
In 2019, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, (CT) featured the first comprehensive retrospective of Hammond’s work from 1971 to 2018. Her work is on view in the “queer abstraction” group exhibition in the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art through March 8, 2020.
In addition to Thursday evening’s lecture, Hammond will be doing a private critique with faculty-selected art students in the FADS building on Friday.
For more information about the event visit the museum’s website: https://www.nermanmuseum.org/calendar/events/2020-02-06-jnerman-lecture-harmony-hammond.html
Learn more about Harmony Hammond at: http://www.harmonyhammond.com/
Story and photos by Penny Thieme
