Letting the Weather Get In, 1977

Oil and wax-resin compound on canvas
© 2022 Harmony Hammond/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Ian Reeves.

Harmony Hammond moved to New York in 1969. With fellow artists Zarina and Howardena Pindell, among others, Hammond cofounded A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York, in 1972 and the Heresies Collective, publisher of the quarterly feminist magazine Heresies, in 1976. Like many of her feminist peers, Hammond moved away from what she called the “male-dominated site of painting” in the early 1970s, turning instead toward materials and techniques associated with craft. Letting the Weather Get In belongs to Hammond’s 1974–77 series of “weave paintings” and represents the beginnings of her interest in the monochrome. She created these works by applying layers of oil paint mixed with Dorland’s Wax Medium—a mixture of resin and wax that allows the paint to be more easily manipulated—to an oblong canvas. While the thick impasto surface was still wet, Hammond used the hard end of a paintbrush to dig into it in different directions, creating a textured, braided pattern.