Harmony Hammond: Against Seamlessness

The vessel form in its distended hollowness is both a metaphor and a vehicle for an organic feeling that runs through much of [Duckworth’s] work and reflects her own deep empathy for the natural world.

— Martin Puryear

In the twenty years since the last major publication on the work of Ruth Duckworth, much has changed in how the field of ceramics is understood in relation to the realms of fine art and craft. Always regarding herself as a sculptor rather than a potter or ceramicist, Duckworth was ahead of her time, insisting that her work be considered in the same light and exhibited alongside that of her contemporaries working in bronze (which she also used occasionally), stone, welded metal, and other traditional sculptural media.

The discourse around ceramics has now caught up to her, and Ruth Duckworth includes an extensive presentation of her work in porcelain and stoneware, revealing the continued and growing influence of this trailblazing artist. As Emmanuelle Cooper wrote in the artist’s obituary: “In both her life and work, Duckworth’s background was one of non-conformity. In Germany, as a young girl, she risked prosecution by defacing a Nazi monument and resented being unable to attend art school because her father was Jewish. Most challenging of all was her determination to gain international respectability as a sculptor working primarily in clay.”

Ruth Duckworth includes a foreword and afterword by fellow artists Martin Puryear and Marie Herwald Hermann, along with a deeply humanizing conversation between curator Jo Lauria and Thea Burger, Duckworth’s longtime friend, agent, and representative of her estate.

I always say [the art is] active even when there’s no sound in the room; they are affecting the subtlest of sounds in the space—dampening and absorbing even the human voice.

— Jennie C. Jones

A Free and Shifting Tonal Center is Jennie C. Jones’s first monograph, exploring her interdisciplinary practice that moves viewers through both visual and auditory engagement. Aurally altering the spaces in which her paintings, sculptures, and installations are on view, Jones’s work encourages viewers to anticipate sound even in the quietest of environments.

Conceptually, Jones’s practice reflects on the legacies of modernism and minimalism while underscoring the connection between minimalism and music, illuminating the influence of the Black avant-garde. Bringing this multi-sensory experience to book form, A Free and Shifting Tonal Center unites documentation of recent exhibitions—including Dynamics, her expansive show at the Guggenheim Museum (2022)—with excerpts of text, poetry, and conversations to create a “score” that reveals the layers of Jones’s artwork. Part artist’s book and part primer, this lyrical volume unfolds in movements, like a printed and bound evening of poetry, prose, and music.

I think we’ve fallen into an elaborate but beneficent trap that Agnes Martin has set for us. She gives the paintings these titles so that when you speak of them, you can say something like, “I love Happiness” or “I’m very moved by Innocence” or “I came around a corner and saw Friendship.” She’s giving us language in an unembarrassed way, so that things can happen to us when we actually say those words.

— Teju Cole

This is a re-envisioned, fresh look at Agnes Martin, the enigmatic, influential, highly independent painter whose life (1912–2004) spanned much of the twentieth century and extended into the twenty-first. Martin’s abstract, deceptively simple paintings continue to resonate with contemporary artists and writers. In a series of essays commissioned especially for this volume, the contributors write about Martin’s influence on their creative lives and work, and offer new interpretations that defy stereotyped notions about Martin’s life. The result is a varied tapestry of voices, proving that Martin’s art still influences the contemporary world, and offering glimpses into modes of being and making that are still relevant nearly two decades after her death.

Crossings + Accumulations brings together documentation of two recent exhibitions of Hammonds work, Crossings and Accumulations, at Alexander Gray Associates in New York City. Featuring large-scale, textured, surface-heavy canvases, both exhibitions further refine the artist’s interest in “material engagement” to expand and subvert the narrative of modernist abstraction. In these series, the artist imbues abstraction with bodily content, embodying her belief that materials and the ways they are manipulated can bring social and political content into formal abstraction. The book features Hammond’s own writings about Crossings, along with an essay on her overall practice by scholar Alex Bacon.

For years, Hammond has worked with found and repurposed materials and objects such as rags, straw, latex rubber, hair, linoleum, roofing tin, and burnt wood as well as buckets, gutters, and water troughs as a means of introducing content to the world of abstraction. Her near-monochrome paintings of the last two decades participate in the narrative of modernist abstraction and at the same time insist on an oppositional discourse of feminist and queer theory. Their focus on materiality and the indexical, suggesting topographies of body and place, derives from and remains in conversation with her feminist work of the 1970s.