Jane Hammond
Encyclopedia
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
who lives and works in New York City. She was influenced by the late composer John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
. She collaborated with the poet John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
, making 62 paintings based on titles suggested by Ashbery; she also collaborated with the poet Raphael Rubinstein.
Background
"Language has always been important to Hammond, who was the editor of her high school literary magazine" and studied poetry and biology at Mount Holyoke CollegeMount Holyoke College
Mount Holyoke College is a liberal arts college for women in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It was the first member of the Seven Sisters colleges, and served as a model for some of the others...
before earning her BA in art in 1972. After studying ceramics at Arizona State University
Arizona State University
Arizona State University is a public research university located in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area of the State of Arizona...
, she received her MFA in sculpture from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 1977, she moved to New York and began compiling images from instructional or scientific manuals, children's books, books on puppetry and magic, as well as charts on alchemy, animals, religion, and phrenology. From this collection she culled 276 images that functioned as her image bank for subject matter.
Early career
In 1989, Hammond received her first one-person exhibition at the New York alternative space, Exit Art. Since 1989, Hammond has exhibited internationally in Spain, Sweden, Italy, and Holland.In 1989, Hammond was invited by Bill Goldston to print at ULAE. After experimenting with monoprints, she turned to a combination of lithography, silkscreen, intaglio, and collage to achieve the complex layering of her trademark images.
In 1993, the Cincinnati Art Museum organized her first museum exhibition.
In June 1993, Hammond asked Ashbery to recommend titles for future paintings. A week later he faxed her 44 titles. By December 1994, she had employed 13 of the titles, "reusing one four times and another twice." In 1994, several of their collaborative paintings were exhibited at Jose Freire Fine Art, New York City, New York; The Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania and the Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida.
Contemporary work
In 2003, Hammond became the first woman to create the poster for the French Open tennis tournament; her poster became the cover of Tennis Week magazine. Primarily a painter, Hammond also works with photographs, and makes prints. She made prints at ULAE (Universal Limited Art Editions) and at Shark's Ink. She is represented by (among others) Galerie Lelong in New York and the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle.According to a 2002 article in the New York Times, “Ms. Hammond [aims] to make paintings 'as complicated, inconsistent, varied, multifaceted as you are, as I am, as life is.... I think my work deals very directly with the time that we live in,' Ms. Hammond said. 'There's a surfeit of information, increasingly bodiless because of the computer, and I bring to this an interest in how meaning is constructed'.... The best metaphor for the method behind her rollicking, erudite, street-smart, angst-ridden, encyclopedic paintings is writing."
The Times spoke of Hammond's "predilection for systems. For decades it has been her practice to limit all her paintings to mix-and-match selections from a total of 276 found images." Since this article was written, Hammond has moved in new directions; she no longer limits her painting to a body of found images.
Painting is a cross between high philosophy and cement work. My biggest way of relating to this concept of time and labor is that it is an entry point for reaching the unconscious. The layers of paint have more to do with duration than texture. I see it as a function of time, like the idea of chanting. Certain things can begin to happen because you're with the painting for long periods of time.
“Jane Hammond: Paper Work” an exhibition which contained all manner of works on paper from 1989 through 2006 recently travelled with presentations at the Tucson Museum of Art; the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI (formerly the Elvehjem Museum); the Arkansas Arts Center
Arkansas Arts Center
One of the leading cultural institutions in the state, the Arkansas Arts Center is located on the corner of 9th and Commerce streets in MacArthur Park, Little Rock, Arkansas, USA. The Arkansas Arts Center was founded in 1960, but the idea began in 1914, when the Fine Arts Club of Arkansas formed...
, Little Rock, AR; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; the Achenbach Foundation at the DeYoung Museum, San Francisco, CA and the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI. The show was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Penn State Press and the Mt. Holyoke College Museum, containing essays by Faye Hirsch and Nancy Princenthal and an interview with the artist by Douglas Dreishspoon. The exhibition was organized and first presented by the Mt. Holyoke College Museum of Art (2006). Read more about the exhibition catalogue and purchase it directly at Hammond: Paper Work" at Amazon.com
On August 11, 2007, Hammond's painting "All Souls (Piedras Negras)" sold for $75,000 at an auction at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, Colorado.