Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 6

Born 1944 in Chicago, IL
Lives in Galisteo, NM

Over the course of five decades, Harmony Hammond has created a queer feminist language of abstract art embedded in histories of sewing, weaving, quilting, making, and the struggles of women. In Chenille #11, underlying colors of red and gold split the seams and stain the thickly painted white burlap surface, evoking chenille bedspreads with its tufts and ridges. Grommeted straps bind the painting like bandages.

In Patched, the repurposed and mended quilt cover foregrounds women’s time and labor. Cotton squares stained with blood lie in the center of cross- like spaces formed by the quilt pattern, referencing the “repeated and ongoing violence against women, [including] the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, and sexual brutality against women used as a weapon of war.” A grid of grommeted holes below the quilt functions as a footnote, suggesting order but also bearing witness to the ongoing repetition of violence and healing.