HARMONY HAMMOND is an American artist artist, activist, curator, and writer born on this date in Hometown, Illinois.

Hammond moved to New York in 1969, just months after the Stonewall Riots. During the late 1960s, Hammond was married for a short time, and found out she was pregnant with her daughter, at which point she and her husband decided to part ways. In 1973, Hammond publicly came out as a Lesbian.

Hammond curated A Lesbian Show in 1978 at 112 Greene Street Workshop, featuring works by lesbian artists. She was one of the featured artists in the “Great American Lesbian Art Show” at the Woman’s Building in 1980. In 1981, Hammond curated and exhibited her work in Home Work: The Domestic Environment As Reflected in the Work of Women Artists, sponsored by the New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA) and The Women’s Hall of Fame, Seneca Falls, NY. She also curated an exhibition in 1999 at Plan B Evolving Arts in Santa Fe titled Out West, bringing together 41 Lesbian, Gay, bisexual, transgender and Two-Spirit artists from the Southwest.

Hammond authored her first book, Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art, and the Martial Arts, a corpus of her writings from 1973 to 1983 published by TSL Press, in 1984. In 2000 she published Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History. She is featured in two 2010 films on feminist art – The Heretics, directed by Joan Braderman which focuses on the founders of the magazines Heresies: A Feminist Publication of Art and Politics in 1976; and  !Women Art Revolution, directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson.

In 1984, she moved to New Mexico. As a tenured full professor, Hammond taught painting, combined media and graduate critiques at the University of Arizona in Tucson, from 1988 to 2005. Hammond continues to teach workshops and writes, curates, and lectures on feminist, lesbian, and queer art.

She has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottleib Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, among others. In 2013, the Women’s Caucus for Art announced that Hammond would be one of the 2014 recipients of the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Harmony Hammond Papers were acquired by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles in 2016.

Harmony Hammond: Material Witness, Five Decades of Art, Hammond’s first museum survey, is currently taking place at the Aldritch Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.