Harmony Hammond: Crossings + Accumulations

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.

As an artist, I give images form, making breath visible. While painting, writing, and working with glass, I pay attention to the possibly transformative gift of an image.

— Judy Tuwaletstiwa

Near White Sands, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 am Mountain War Time, a nuclear fireball sucked the white sand of the Jornada del Muerto desert high into a still dark sky. The melted sand returned to the earth as a rain of molten glass. Scientists named these glass shards Trinitite, after the site, Trinity. At the time, artist Judy Tuwaletstiwa was 4 years old. Haunted by the specter the United States released in detonating atomic bombs in New Mexico, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tuwaletstiwa turned to sand and fire to explore this primal creative/destructive act. 

The artist writes: “The raw material that becomes glass holds an interaction of wind, water, fire and earth, the organic creative process lived over geologic time. This transformative process continues to live in my studio through how I work with glass.” A follow-up book to her sold-out Mapping Water (2007), Glass weaves a story of her discoveries and explorations while working with glass over the past four years based on her work over the past 45 years in fiber, paint and writing. Tuwaletstiwa’s use of glass on canvas and paper is at once refined and surprising—a truly revolutionary response to a well-known medium. The highly personal combination of text and images in this book bridges fine art and craft, technology and nature, the political and the aesthetic, the conceptual and the material.

[Hammond] pioneered a visual language that confronted gender, class, and sexual orientation within the higher realms of a painterly abstraction, bridging a sentient and materially rich abstraction with an active social awareness.

–Amy Smith-Stewart, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

This book of work by Harmony Hammond includes reproductions of eight thickly-painted, monochrome and near-monochrome paintings. While these paintings engage with the history of modernist painting—more specifically, narratives of abstraction and monochrome—they come out of post-minimal and feminist concerns with materials and process rather than modernist reduction. They are formal, frontal, reductive, condensed.