Name: Book Talk: Still Dangerous! The Harmony Hammond Reader
Start: 2026-10-29T18:30:00-04:00
End: 2026-10-29T20:30:00-04:00
Location: Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art

Long before most museums had a vocabulary for it, Harmony Hammond was writing one. Half a century ago she braided remnant fabric pulled from the dumpsters of New York’s garment district into rag-rug floor pieces and soaked donated scraps in paint, making objects that sit stubbornly between painting and sculpture. Alongside the work came the words: essays, reviews, letters and statements that argued, again and again, for the women and lesbian artists the art world preferred not to see. Those writings have now been gathered into a single volume whose title reads like a verdict on their afterlife: Still Dangerous! The Harmony Hammond Reader.

Edited by the art historian Tirza True Latimer, with a foreword by Julia Bryan-Wilson, the book spans five decades of Hammond’s writing. Its subjects are the ones she has never let go of: the historical invisibility of women and lesbian artists, how gender and sexuality shape creative practice, materiality, feminism’s widening reach, resistance to censorship and the strategies of feminist and queer abstraction. Essays sit beside artist’s statements, talks, letters and interviews — a mind at work rather than a finished doctrine.

Detail of a Harmony Hammond painting with layered cream canvas, grommets, a red cloth flap and rust-brown panels below — Image: Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates

That mind shaped institutions as well as arguments. Hammond moved to New York in 1969 and helped found A.I.R., the first cooperative gallery for women artists in the city, and later Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics. Her earlier books include Wrappings, a collection of her texts from the 1970s and early 1980s, and Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History, which became a reference for a field that barely had one. She has lived and worked in northern New Mexico since 1984 and taught for years at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Latimer is a fitting editor. A professor emerita of history of art and visual culture at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, she wrote Women Together / Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris and co-authored Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories with Wanda Corn, scholarship read through the queer feminist lens Hammond helped to grind. The contributors include the critic Holland Cotter and the artists Ulrike Müller and Carlos Motta, alongside the writer Jenn Shapland.

Black and white portrait of the artist Harmony Hammond smiling under a wide-brimmed felt hat — Image: Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates

The launch takes the shape of a conversation rather than a reading. Hammond will be joined by Latimer and by the artist Steve Locke, whose painting, drawing, sculpture and installation press on the Western canon to probe the links between desire, identity and violence. The pairing is apt: Locke works on the canon from the inside, while Hammond has spent half a century asking who was left out of it.

The book talk takes place on Thursday, October 29, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York, the museum dedicated to LGBTQIA+ art, and requires an RSVP. It was announced by Alexander Gray Associates, the New York gallery that represents Hammond. Still Dangerous! is published by Duke University Press and runs to 530 pages in English.

The exclamation mark in the title is not nostalgia. Gathered between two covers, writing once scattered across journals, catalogues and lecture notes becomes what Hammond spent her career demanding for women artists: a record nobody can pretend was never there.

Tags: Alexander Gray Associates, feminist art, Harmony Hammond, Steve Locke, art books, Duke University Press