 I am Catherine Morris, I'm the curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and I'm thrilled to have you all here today to hear Harmony Hammond speak. Some of you may have been here about a year ago when Harmony was part of a panel that was part of our Hyde Seek exhibition, and now we've invited Harmony back again to talk in relationship or inspired by at any rate the exhibition upstairs in the Sackler Center, materializing six years, Lucy R. LaParde, and the emergence of the conceptual art movement. We will have a third opportunity at the museum to see Harmony also this coming February, when she's going to be participating at the Feminist Art Panel Day in relationship to CAA here in February. Put that on your calendar. I think that's the 16th. Feeling a little bit like holes to Newcastle, but I will introduce Harmony to those of you who I feel like probably all know this inside and outside, but Harmony, as you know, is a pioneering feminist from the Feminist Art movement. She lives and works in Gallisteo. After receiving a BA from the University of Minnesota in 1967, Harmony moved to New York in 1969, and she was co-founder of AIR, the First Women's Cooperative Art Gallery in New York in 1972, and Heresies, a feminist publication on art and politics 1976 founding. Harmony is taught and lectured extensively, including teaching, painting, combined media, and interdisciplinary graduate critique seminars at the University of Arizona in Tucson for 17 years between 1989 and 2006, and continues to teach and talk extensively. Harmony's had over 40 solo exhibitions, and her work has been shown internationally. Local venues where you may have seen her work include the New Museum, the Whitney, PS1 MoMA, the Bronx Museum, White Columns, Smack Mellon, and, of course, the Brooklyn Museum. Her work was included in two important recent exhibitions, High Times, Hard Times, New York Painting, 1967 to 1975 at the National Academy, and in WAC, Art and the Feminist Revolution. Her work has been written about extensively. Most recently, in the article, Queerly Made, Harmony Hammons Floor Pieces by Julia Bryan Wilson in the Journal of Modern Craft, among many, many others. Harmony's work is represented in the permanent collections of many museums, and she is the recipient of fellowships from, among others, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Joan Mitchell, Krasner Foundations, the New York State Council for the Art, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Excuse me, National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to being here for TFAP in February, she will also be the recipient of CAA's Distinguished Feminist Award. Without further ado, thank you, Harmony. One more piece of further ado. If you could please turn off cell phones, we'd appreciate it. Thank you. Hi there. Can we turn off the lights, please? I want to, let's see, where am I going to put this? I want to start by just saying thank you to Catherine Morris and the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art for inviting me to talk in the context of their current exhibition, Materializing Six Years Lucy Lapard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art. What we all, in shorthand, refer to as the Lucy Show, much to her. She would not like that, but that's how we refer to it. And anyway, and I also want to just thank you all for coming. It's been really nice seeing you come in and great to see so many old and new friends. So thank you for doing this on your Sunday afternoon. Lucy Lapard and I go back to the early 70s. Many of you already know this story, but I wish to tell it again as it reflects the radical social and political change taking place at that time thanks to the Women's Liberation Movement. So word was out on the street that this critic named Lucy Lapard was making studio visits to look at work by women artists for an exhibition she was guest curating. I called her too late to be considered, but she came to my studio on the corner of Spring and West Broadway anyway. Her son Ethan, then about seven years old, in tow. My daughter Tanya, less than a year old, lay asleep in her crib. I showed Lucy my work, sculptures of bags made of rags recycled from women friends in the neighborhood sweatshops. We talked about the work, its meaning, and its relationship to women's lives. We were women, we were mothers, and we were art professionals. One identity did not rule out another. In other words, we did not have to hide the fact that we were mothers in order to be acting professionally as we would have a decade earlier. To my surprise, Lucy bought this piece, my first sale in New York. Since then, Lucy and I have worked together in New York and New Mexico both in and outside of various art worlds. We were both members of the collective of 20 women who founded the Quarterly Heresies of Feminist Publication on Art and Politics in 1976 and we worked as editors on the inaugural issue published in 1977 and we worked as co-editors on the ninth issue published in 1980. In 1984, I moved to Santa Fe for one year but ended up staying on and in 1989 bought a place in Galisteo, a traditionally spinal village of approximately 300 people, now half gentrified with anglos like myself. It's 20 to 30 minutes outside of Santa Fe. Lucy would come visit and eventually she too bought land in Galisteo where she's become an invaluable member of the community, most notably as editor of our newsletter El Puente de Galisteo. Since then, Lucy and I have hiked the high desert, fought against oil and gas drilling and trespassed in many places where we are not welcome. These days, okay, so what I want to show you here is we used to do a lot of hiking. Nancy Holt, the sculptor Nancy Holt, Lucy, myself and then the woman, second from the right, another artist from the Santa Fe area, Michelle Goodman and the four of us would go hiking and this is a very early crude digital kind of graphic. Michelle had found this photograph of this hiking club and so she inserted our heads on the top of these supposedly male figures, we don't of course really know, but so that's myself, there's Lucy, second from the left, Michelle and Nancy Holt and then Michelle's dog and the name, the Hallumina Club is Harmony Lucy Michelle Nancy, the letters from our names. I can't wait to put that in a catalog someday. Okay, these days Lucy is most interested in notions of place or people's space, the intersection of land, environment and culture, but she also continues to write about art and to curate exhibitions, all I might add or emphasize from a feminist perspective. Over the years I have been lucky to have Lucy write about my work in relation to the diverse sites that I inhabit. Basically, I do two kinds of art. Abstract work that consists of large near monochrome paintings and related works on paper and more overtly political work dealing with issues of intolerance, censorship and self-censorship. This afternoon I'm going to talk primarily about painting, about abstract painting and my intent is to fold. I know I sound like I'm running for office or something, my intent is to fold, okay, to make the point that all art, here's the points, to make the point that all art participates in multiple narratives and to counter simplistic and stereotype notions of feminist and queer art. This does not seem to be moving as it's supposed to. There we go, okay. In early fall of 1969 I moved from Minneapolis where I had been making large geometric, hearted shaped paintings to lower Manhattan. It was a period of civil rights in anti-American Vietnam War activism, the beginning of the gay liberation movement and the second wave of the feminist movement and the birth of the feminist art movement. I was influenced by and contributed to early feminist art projects. It was also a period of post-minimal interdisciplinary experimentation with materials and process resulting in work that was both conceptual and abstract. Artists moved back and forth between what might be called painting, sculpture, video and performance, calling it one thing one day and another thing the next day. Feminists brought a gendered content to this way of working. By 1970, my work had changed radically. I and many other feminist artists abandoned the male dominated site of painting, consciously using materials, techniques and formal strategies associated with women's traditional arts precisely because of their marginalized histories and associations. Underlying this practice of course was the belief that materials in my case fabric and the ways they are manipulated, weaving, stitching, wrapping, braiding contribute to content as much as form, sign or symbol. My earliest feminist work made reference to women's traditional arts such as weaving and needlework by using recycled hand-me-downs, rags given to me by women friends literally putting my life in my art. Partially for financial reasons and partially because I wanted to move away from the masculinist tradition of painting, I began to paint with acrylic on worn out blankets, curtains, sheets and bedspreads. I liked the old weathered leathery effect of the paint saturating the unprimed unstretched cloth. Ripped strips of cloth were dipped in paint and attached to the painting surface so they hung down like three-dimensional brushstrokes. The weight of the rags and the paint began to alter the painting rectangle. Gradually the rags took over, activating the painting field. This led to a series of bags like the one that Lucy purchased. Here's another example which were hung on the wall and the slightly larger than life-sized presences which hung out in space. These bags and presences were featured in my first solo exhibition in AIR in 1972. They were about layering, connecting and building whole presences out of accumulated fragments of found materials, initiating what I call a survivor aesthetic that continues to inform my work to this day. In contrast to my Minneapolis work, these new pieces, given their physicality, could be touched, retouched, repaired and, like women's lives, reconfigured. In 1973 I created a series of six-floor paintings made out of knit fabric. My daughter and I picked from dumpsters in the garment districts of Lower Manhattan. Strips of the fabric were braided according to traditional braided rug techniques, but slightly larger and thicker in scale, coiled and then stitched to a heavy cloth backing and partially painted with acrylic paint. Referencing rag rugs, but non-functional as such, the floor pieces occupied and negotiated a space between painting off the wall and sculpture nearly flat, although because of my painting background, I thought of them primarily as paintings. Approximately one inch high and five-and-a-half feet in diameter, the floor pieces were to be placed directly on the floor and shown as a group without anything on the walls, thereby calling into question assumptions about the quote, place, unquote, of painting. These two floor pieces were included in the exhibition High Times, Hard Times that Catherine mentioned, an important and long overdue exhibition curated by Katie Siegel and David Reed that revisited a time and a place, Lower Manhattan, 1967 to 1975, and revisited the experimental work being made at that time in that place, but looked at it through a painting lens. One could obviously look at the same work through a different lens. Later work with fabric included a series of wrap sculptures, which I also approached as a painter, and by that I mean, I think my approach is, it's primarily additive, painting is primarily additive when I make three-dimensional work or sculpture, it's primarily additive. These were not stuffed fabric forms, but rather fabric wrapped around wooden armatures, so they were made out of themselves from the inside out, consciously presencing bodies more than figures, although the wood armatures inside functioned as skeleton, the fabric as muscle or tissue, and then the paint or latex rubber on the surface certainly functioned as skin. This piece, Hunker Time, which was made in the late 70s, 79 to 80, in this piece the ladders are obviously stand-in for gendered bodies. They're both hard and soft, which I relate to my body and women's bodies, and the fact that they're kind of hanging out there, kind of waiting for their moment to action, they lean against each other, they touch, as if waiting for a moment of collective action. I think of this piece as very reflective of the importance of collectivity in the women's liberation movement at the time. I also took a lot of kind of perverse pleasure in taking these very simple, serious, minimal forms and patting them, making them soft and hard, and then putting these flirtatious ruffles on some of them at the same time. This piece, some of you may have seen, was in Whack Art in the Feminist Revolution, another long overdue show, I would say about 40 years too late, curated by Connie Butler, and traveling, and it showed here in New York at PS1. Here's another piece. This piece is called Radiant Affection, and it's the last wrapped piece I made before I left New York. And you can see here again, this hangs on the wall. The rungs are about this thick, and then that's the wall that you're seeing in between. You can stick your hand in there, and you can see by this time I'm using the wrapping process. In other words, I'm not painting different colors so much on the surface, although the ends are a different color. But the color that you're seeing coming through the latex rubber, that surface is activated by a manipulation of the materials. And here's a detail. So this work from that period obviously owes a lot to the work of Eva Hesse. But when people ask me more about what I was looking at or thinking about, I would have to say it was the writings of Monique Vitig, specifically the lesbian body where she discusses the inside of the body as this raw, sensuous, almost with an edge of violence to it, the muscles and tissues of the inside of the body. And so I was thinking about her writings, which were sensuous and abstract and theoretical all at the same time. So this is a bad image, but you can get a sense of the juiciness of it all, of that sense of the interior body, the wrapping, things showing from underneath, kind of coming up to the surface, and the very materials itself, the latex rubber holding the piece together. And I mention these things because there are things that inform the work I do today. In the mid-70s, I created a series of small oil and wax paintings that looked as if they were woven out of paint. The surface was slowly built up with successive layers of oil paint mixed with Dorland's wax. Weave patterns at first grids with marks and later braid patterns were obsessively incised into the paint. The surface was irregular, lumpy and bumpy, emphasizing the painting surface as skin and indirectly the body. For me, the painting skin, that edge where art and life meet, always relates to the body as sight. Two layers strokes of paint is to accumulate, to build on the body, to caress. To incise into the painting surface is to cut into the body. Looking beautiful and woven from a distance, almost monochrome, up close the under layers of color were exposed and little points protruded from the surface of the painting. These points were at once menacing and fragile. This is kind of looking down a painting surface towards an edge. Sometimes I tack scraps of fabric and wads of newspaper between the stretcher bar and the back of the canvas, creating a slight rounding or swelling around the edge of the painting, much more subtle than the shape paintings I had made in Minneapolis. It is two more. By 1976, many of the paintings became lozenge shaped. The curved ends mirroring the swellings in the painting surface. In 1976, these paintings were exhibited at Lamania Gallery here in New York, with collection of fragments, an ethnographic display case, and vitrine featuring fabricated clay shards imprinted with basket weaves that set up an abstract dialogue with the paintings. The accompanying labels identified the artist as the maker of the shards and included a quote from George Wharton, quote, baskets are the Indian women's poems, the shaping of them her sculpture. They drove into them the story of their life and love, end quote. By employing conceits of museum display, I was able to bridge and engage ethnographic craft and fine art disciplines anticipating the 90s discourse of the museum's role of collecting, labeling, and displaying artifacts in the creation and authentication of a historical narrative. The collection of fragments functioned to create a narrative of women's creative practices and to place my work within that narrative. By referencing baskets and exhibiting clay shards along with the paintings, I was able to take the feminist project of creating and historical narrative of women's creativity, very consciously to bring it back into the painting field, merging traditional and fine arts in the skin of paint. I've always been interested in the possibilities of content in abstraction, especially what Cobain Emerser calls discrepant abstraction, or all that does not fit neatly into the institutional narrative of abstract art as a monolithic quest for purity. For years I've worked with found and recycled materials and objects as one way to introduce content into the world of abstraction. Found materials and objects have their own associations and histories that they obviously bring with them when they are recontextualized in a work of art. I've utilized materials such as fabric, rusted corrugated roofing tin, linoleum, latex rubber, straw, leather, burnt wood, and objects such as water troughs, gutters, buckets, screens, and dead birds, all along with oil paint in what I call these mixed media installational paintings, where I take the materials and the objects and so forth. This has gotten much more figurative than I normally do. And I put them together in what I call uneasy juxtapositions to kind of suggest narratives usually of loss, violence, and survival. So they often sit on the floor, kind of hang out there, like that painting Hunker Time. And they're kind of tableau, like in oftentimes there are objects or things that kind of either sit in the floor in front of them or are placed on the surface. And so we could talk about this work, for instance, within the conversation of expanded painting. Okay, this piece is called Inappropriate Longings, and it's again one of those paintings. And it and some of the works that follow, I'm going to say, were shown in, what was it, 1998 at Smack Mellon in Dumbo. It was, I think, their opening exhibition, and I showed a lot of these types of works there at that time. So some of you may have seen them. I want to talk a little bit, just to elaborate on this particular painting because it gives you a sense of bringing in the objects and content into what's basically abstract painting. So this is a triptych. Each panel is about six feet wide. The left is linoleum and latex rubber with some oil or acrylic paint smushed on it. The center is oil painting with latex rubber over it, definitely not archival. And then that piece of linoleum or house-shaped thing there is linoleum, and then on the right, this is all pieces, those fragments, this idea of making a hole again out of the pieces and the fragments, but it's all the underside of linoleum because another kind of theme that goes through my work is I'm really interested in what's buried, what's underneath, the underside of things, the hidden side, what are the secrets, what is hidden under there, what secrets or information asserts itself. It's like the materials in a house, the floors, the walls, know what went on in that domestic environment. So in this case, we have those three panels, and then that's part of a gutter, which is obviously a body kind of reference hanging on the underside of the linoleum. This water trough is part of the piece because I was using gutters a lot at this time and using them as metaphors for circulatory systems, but they were all dried up. There is no water flowing through them. There is no life blood. A lot of them is that previous painting, the farm ghost painting, were about abandoned farms, farms that can no longer function because there is no water, there is no life fluid. But I use that in another kind of larger way as well. And so here, these are just leaves from the Bosque behind my house. There is no water or life fluids flowing here. Up close, this is the left-hand panel, if you get up close, you can see, carved into the surface, the words, God damn dyke. And you have to get up close, because from a distance it doesn't look, people don't walk in the room and go, oh, a political art. Here's your painting, or here's a lesbian painting, or this is a political painting. They kind of are drawn in, and it's only when they walk up close, you know, it's kind of like at this level, they see these, it's very sharp, was cut in with a razor blade, as if somebody was carving into skin, the words, God damn dyke. And it's in a painting where they don't expect to see it. And that was the intention, because this painting was made in reaction to a time, I think it was around 1993, in reaction to a state, Colorado state constitutional amendment that denied lesbians and gay men protection from discrimination. There were a lot of different human rights amendments in the different parts of the country at that time, some we wanted, some we did not want. And this piece came in response to, I want to say I read it in the Village Boys, but I don't know, but there was some sort of article or something that talked about a woman who had been murdered, and these words were carved into her back for having a celebrate diversity bumper sticker. So that was in here. And what I was trying to do, if I go back here, I was very consciously bringing a queer presence into the modernist painting field, where I can assure you it's really not welcome, and also into this kind of narrative of rural America, outside of urban environments, because obviously queers live every place. So I was very consciously working it that way. A quick little story, and I'll move on here is when this painting was shown, I had a big solo show at the Tucson Museum of Art, which is circular. And it's kind of like the Guggenheim in a sense. So this painting was the point being that a museum guard could see the painting from any point. It was always visible. Anyway, the painting's up. It's in the show. I'm at some party afterwards, and it's a woman who's a docent comes up to me, and she says, my dear, she said something terrible has happened. Somebody has vandalized your painting. And then she went into this whole thing about what had happened. And what was so fascinating to me and interesting to me was that that was more feasible than that the artist could have put those words in the painting. In other words, that somebody would have gotten a chair or a stool, went over in front of the painting and stood on it high enough and happened to have a razor and take time and carve these words in, get back down, put the stool back without anybody noticing that was more feasible than that there was an intentionality on the part of the artist. So obviously I had to enlighten her, but I don't remember. It was too long ago, but I explained it, and I just explained it. At this point, I'm sure she went like, oh, I didn't realize or something like that, but I don't remember the conversation because the other thing was so striking to me that somebody would just assume somebody else did it, that it was vandalized, which was not the case. So I'm going to just show you a couple of others that kind of bring other materials in, bringing content into abstraction. This is a tiny, beautiful little tiny painting. It's a piece of metal that's been perforated or punctured. So it's, on one side, functions as a sieve. On the other, almost like a grater with these little points coming out. When I use metal, I don't clean it. I like the oil paint to bleed into the dust and the dirt. So I'm always working out of this place of materials and process that I talked about in the beginning. And so you can see here, around the red in the openings, that's the oil in the red paint bleeding into the dirty dust on the surface. And another painting. Here, from that period, these were all shown at smack melon. So what was happening is, as I kept moving along, these mixed media paintings were getting simpler and simpler as I was trying to condense everything down and trying to get meaning into the paint itself and its application to rely less and less on objects or materials. This will give you a sense of some scale. So this one here on the right, those are two, as you can see, very large canvases held together with the kind of metal roofing cap that's on a metal roof. So it functions here to suture the two pieces to get panels together. It also kind of divides it, but connects it in a sense. And you get a sense of, by this time, this is not latex rubber. It is a paint color that looks like latex rubber. And I'm finally getting at the surface I really like, which is kind of dry blood and scabby, basically. Here, this is a gutter that is embedded into the painting surface. But again, there's no life fluids. I mean, obviously using gutters, like I said, is circulatory systems, in the gutter, things collect. Anyway, I did a lot of work with that, which I will not show you. Okay, so this gives you a sense of how I'm moving along. So since then, for the last 12 years or so, I have made large, I'm primarily made large, thickly painted near monochrome paintings. When I'm asked, so, what's a nice feminist like you doing in the modernist painting field? A territory that has notoriously excluded women and lesbians? I answer. Painting, like any cultural language, doesn't have to rely on its historicized meanings. I don't accept that painting is an over-determined site, a privileged domain of the authoritative masculine voice, or that monochrome painting is necessarily a dead end, the inevitable conclusion of a history of art as a hierarchy of purification. While these paintings engage with, and I like to think simultaneously, interrupt and resist the history of modernist painting, and more specifically narratives of abstraction and monochrome, they come out of the post-minimal and feminist concerns with materials and process that I've been talking about this afternoon, rather than modernist reduction. They invite content. My work is not pure, isolated, authoritative, universal, self-referential, self-sufficient, or removed from social function. I invoke references and associations. I welcome the world outside the painting edge into the painting field. Because monochrome painting is typically one surface and non-hierarchical in composition, the focus is on nuance, and the focus is on nuance on sameness and difference within and between paintings. I disagree with readings of monochrome based on absence, emptiness, or blankness, because they define monochrome as the other in relation to signification and image. These readings do not take into account the materiality of paint as a carrier of meaning. The paintings are layered and built out of themselves from the inside out. Paint is applied with a brush, but it's not about the stroke or mark in the abstract expressionist sense. The blotchy, encrusted surface, both matte and gloss, simultaneously elegant, raw, crude, definitely handmade, functions as indexical sign of maker and making, and yet looking at the paintings, we aren't sure how they are made. Despite the thickness of paint, surface color and space are often indeterminate, unstable, fugitive. You can't quite locate them. They resist definitive articulation. Unlike a lot of monochromes, these paintings refuse to settle down. The painting surface references other materials and substances at the same time it stubbornly remains itself. Paint. Color, while freed from representation, retains referentiality. Dried blood and other body fluids, wound scabs, scar tissue, scraped hides, burnt wood, weathered and patinated metal, topographical locations. The body is always near. Monochrome refuses disembodiment. It allows one to escape figuration, but presents the body. All painting is about the skin of paint. The skin of paint calls up the body, and therefore the painting body. At their best, the paintings transmute the painting field into the body. If monochrome is a sign of painting's materiality, then near monochrome, what I do, the not quite monochrome, the becoming or unbecoming monochrome, the disruption of monochrome is one place that content enters in. Up close, under layers of color are visible through surface cracks and crevices. It's about what's hidden, what's revealed, buried, pushing up from underneath the painting surface under stress. Might the painting surface as edge between art and life be a site of negotiation? In their refusal to be any one thing, at the same time they are themselves, the paintings can be seen to occupy some sort of fugitive or queer space, and in doing so remain oppositional. Both in the refusal to participate fully in the received narrative of modernist painting, and at the same time the refusal to look queer, but we might say the paintings perform queerly. Take this painting, Muffle, from 2009. It's a painting that marks a transition to my current work. Is it black? Is it dark blue? Is it metallic? Color and surface are difficult to locate, so it continues, thus it continues, my interest in the concept of fugitive. But at the same time the painting is now wrapped with straps of grommeted canvas. Grommeted canvas speaks of grommeted cotton canvas, speaks of tarps, tents, drop claws, and awnings. It's tough and functional. It's got a job to do. It suggests the possibility of connecting, securing, restraining, and I began to see that grommets and tarps and things like that, cotton tarps, they're always in the reinforced area, the hem, the reinforced area along the edges. That's where you find grommets hanging out. So they're always over there in, like I said, they have a job to do and they're in the reinforced areas. For me, grommeted canvas has another association. Many of these paintings are on recycled canvas that was used to cover the woven tatami mats used in Aikido, the Japanese martial art I studied for 36 years. Very long, six to eight foot wide strips of canvas at an awning place are sewn together to form a rectangular canvas that would cover the tatami mats that in turn cover almost the entire dojo floor. These mats eventually wear out and need to be replaced and when this happened once, they gave me all the old canvas, the old canvas cover and I have been using them in many of the paintings as a painting support. So the canvas in this case, in this case the canvas is charged with repeated body contact already including my body. I've become very interested in including those scenes that I said are in the canvas. At first I was trying to show them but I glop so much paint on they would get covered up. So now I'm showing the undersides again or the back. So seams, sutures, the traces and evidence of two edges meeting, piecing, connecting. I see these again as a sign of indexical intention. In this painting which is titled Flap, I'm using the underside of where there's a seam. So the center there is a seam but whenever you bring two pieces of fabric together and you stitch them, if they're stitched here there's the flap on the back. So you're seeing the flap on the back here or the other, or we could talk about it as the under or other side of the mat revealing not only the sewn seam but the flap caused by the two pieces of canvas joined together. So this painting, there's not a lot here. It's huge, it's very large. There's not a lot here except surface and color. The flap itself casts a shadow on the painting surface that kind of suggests or indicates that hidden space under the flap. You can stick your hand up under there. And so it indicates that there's that space there and of course one can do a very gendered reading on that space. It's also important to me, you'll notice that it's tacked down. The flap is tacked down at the sides and there are grommet holes in the four corners. So there's this funny, it's very subtle, but sort of spatial torque. You're very aware of the weight and the texture of the paint and then these holes that kind of, but it's a stretched canvas. They're not about hanging an unstretched canvas. So they're used conceptually and visually not to install the canvas. And there's some kind of strange, you have the flap opens up the space, the color coming from underneath the surface opens up the space, the holes in the grommets open up the space, then it's literally tacked down. You almost feel you could pull it off, pull the painting off in some way and thereby it kind of raises the question of actually where is the painting located. So I think the flap tends to kind of bisect the painting, but it also acts as a very important sort of equal or third zone or space that really insists upon itself and therefore we could say it resists any kind of binaries. The other important thing here, of course, is the color. So here's this big, serious, very minimal painting and then it's just outrageously this peach color. Minimal painters don't make peach paintings. So it kind of asserts itself that way. It's almost too big for itself. And a strange thing, I mean it's partially light here, but actually the painting itself, while it has this real sense of its own body, of its material weight, it kind of hovers in some way at the same time. The newest work from 2010 to 2012 includes straps, staples, grommets, and pushpins suggesting binding, bandaging, bondage, restraint, and constraint. Possibilities of connecting, tying down, securing, reinforcing, embracing, and covering up. So the surfaces have more ruptures and more seams than the early monochromes, which I like. I want to show those. Paint collects along the edges of the straps in the pushpins and staples like scar tissue and sometimes cast shadows so you feel you could go and just kind of pull it off. It feels a little unfinished or something like that. So at the same time, with these diagonals, you can read some of these straps spatially, but one of the things that's important to me is that these straps go around the edges. So they actually kind of embrace the painting object or the painting body. So they go around the edges, or most of them do. And the other thing that kind of thwarts or complicates any reading of space is that they sometimes seem to emerge out of the paint itself or disappear into the surface of the paint. And now you can see all this more as I began working with a lighter palette. For years, I just worked with that very dark palette. And so now when I'm working with lighter colors, you can kind of see how the holes, the shadows, and connecting strategies play basically an important role. Let me just show you a couple more of these. And you can see the surfaces, they're not the same. Each surface is slightly different. Some are very matte, some are shinier, nothing's really high gloss. There is still this feeling of materiality. Very often, people talk about my work, that it reminds them of other materials. And yet they know it's just paint. So there's this kind of sense of it. In fact, one critic who was in the studio talked about this quite a bit. He said something like, well, your paintings are, as he put it, they're totally self-sufficient. And what he meant was they have many references to other painters, many other painters, in fact, and not just monochrome painters, but they reference many other, a wide range of works. But they are totally self-sufficient in the sense that they are their own thing. And they demand that you accept them on that term, on those terms. Now another thing that happens here with these paintings is the people who reviewed them, they talk about them, write about them, they're totally into these straps as binding, bondage, all of this. I'm really interested in the holes, the grommets. So that's kind of where I'm at and what's interesting to me. The holes, I mean, grommets, of course, like I said, the first, I should say, that the first straps with the grommet holes came from those aikido mats, which they had cut off those hems with the grommets, and just given them to me in a garbage bag. And I liked them, and they just kind of knocked around my studio for a while. I began to use them in that painting muffle. And then I ran out of them. So then I'm looking around at tarps and which kinds of tarps, out of which materials have grommets. And anyway, I go through, you know, I'm really needing grommets, okay, and I'm really needing grommets. So finally it took me a while, because I just have to get there slowly, and I saw my own, in most cases, saw my own straps and do my own grommeting. The grommets, so as we know, like I said, grommets have all this sense of functionality about them and potential of tying down, holding together, connecting. For me, they also suggest body orifices. And at the same time, of course, formally they literally open up the painting surface, alluding to buried layers or secret spaces below. And of course, grommets also have their own painting history as they were used extensively in the late 60s and early 70s by artist painting on unstretched canvas as a way to hang or informally present painting. Mine are all on stretched canvas, so like I said, I'm using the grommets in a much more conceptual way. I love, I try to just paint not too self-consciously, so some fill in, some are open, just as those little nubs that are on the painting surface are really pushpins that were originally there to hold the straps in place, to kind of do compositional things. And then with that painting muffle, I realized I didn't want to take them off and I didn't know why. And then finally, I just kind of accepted them and I realized I liked them as these little things that stick out on the surface. And so they stick out from the surface, then you have these different layers of the bands, and then you have the grommets that allude again to that hidden space below under the painting. And of course, emphasize the body references, which in this case you can see there's kind of a little oozing coming out or rust. It looks, it's paint, but it looks like rust coming out of the holes with strings. It looks like perhaps you could pull these and cinch it. Now people talk about these straps as if, you know, it's about constriction and binding and cinching things together. They really don't do that if you look at that. I mean, they're just not that taught at all. And the point is that it's really the paint itself that holds these paintings together, not the straps. So here's one last of these paintings. It's a favorite of mine. It's called Red Bed. And it, unlike any of the other work, I became very aware of its reference to Rauschenberg's series of red paintings and his famous bed painting of 1955, which was a huge influence on me as an art student. So in the painting, I became aware of its reference not only because of its color, but because of its single bed size and its manner in which it insists upon the upright flat bed picture plane. And so in a funny way, this became an homage to work that had been very influential on me as a younger artist. It also, if you think back to that first red blanket that I showed you with things hanging off of it, it's very, very similar to that as well. So sometimes we don't move that far away from what we started with. I'm just going to show you some others very quickly here, and then we can do some question and answer. These are small. These are torso size. They're just an example of some recent paintings I did because I don't do a lot of small paintings. And again, I was kind of responding to that notion of people thinking that the bands cinch or cinching the painting or cinching the body. And again here, it calls that up in the painting series. It doesn't need call cinch, but it's clearly, they're not that tight at all. So just think of them as sort of torso size. And again, the surfaces are different. This one's called lace. And then I want to end on these monotypes, which I made with Marina Ancona, who has a master printer here in Brooklyn, and she has a print shop in Santa Fe as well. Her press is called Ten Grand. And we did these monotypes together. And I put them in at the end just to show you, because again, well, there's a number of things. In this case, the holes go all the way, the grommets and the holes go all the way through. And I haven't done that yet in the paintings on canvas. I could, I maybe will. But it was just an immediate thing here. Again, these images come very much out of just materials and process. Again, they look like maybe this is rusted metal or some other material. And yet you know they're on paper. It's like you, you know, intellectually you know it's paper, but it looks like something else. So I don't intend to do that. I don't start out to make something that looks like rusty metal. But sometimes it happens and like that's fine. Now these I put in my last show and people became very interested in them. And to bring this back around to Lucy, you know, my friend and cohort in crime, she started calling these grommet types. So these monotypes are now called, and it just caught on. Everybody now calls them grommet types. So thanks to Lucy. So I'm just going to show you some of the recent grommet types. Again, another that kind of surface, which has to be different, of course, than what you do in painting. It's comparable equivalent, because as you know, I know many of you here today are artists. So monotyping is essentially planographic, which is really hard for me. Okay, because obviously I like that sense of materiality and a kind of agency that comes with a sense of materiality. And these were most recently done where you see they're beginning to change a little bit the surface. So I'll just show you these real quick, a few of them. And I've had to, you know, at a certain point I went like, oh, I don't want to do nice grommeting. That's boring, you know. So now I just smash these babies really hard and they kind of all go in their own direction. It's much more visually interesting, for instance. So these are just things you do in your process that you sort of slowly figure out. And I believe that is it. This is not mine. And I'd love to have some comments or questions. I don't think it's mine anyway. So yeah, comments, questions, Lester. Really, as I said, I don't do sketches. I don't conceptualize the work ahead of time. However, since I often work in a series of one work leading to another leading to another, you know, maybe by the time I'm to, you know, number four in that body of series or body of work, I mean, I'm not starting out to do a series, but that's just kind of what it becomes. Hopefully by that time I have a clue, you know, of what I'm doing. Not always. And so I really don't know entirely. I might have some ideas, but it's based on previous work. It's just a conceptual territory. I'm kind of, or sense of materiality that I'm just kind of moving around, experimenting, seeing. And I find that's, for me, I know artists work different ways, I mean, that's a much more productive place out of which to make work. And much more interesting work, I would say. So, you know, every artist has their own process, obviously. In my case, I try to not think too much and make the work. And then there's a point where, in the making of an individual piece, or as I work in a series over a period of time, where I am sitting back in the studio and I'm kind of doing my own, you know, critical analysis or visual analysis of the work. And I'm really in that process, beginning to find out what it's really about and what I'm doing. And at that point, decisions can be made to go this direction, to go right or left or down the middle or all, you know, whatever. But it's kind of, at that point, there are decisions to be made conceptually if I want to pull something out, or decisions might be made in terms of materials or visually. So there is a point of that thinking. And then I'm really lucky that I get to talk about my work. I get to go to universities and stuff. And, you know, as I said, I get paid to come and turn out the lights and talk about myself. So it's like I, because I get to do that, I do have a sense of my process and what I'm doing. It's really, you know, helpful to me because I get to review my own work and see what I was doing. I don't like to think about that while I'm doing it. It's not helpful because then you're outside yourself looking at yourself and forget it, you know. Well, because I physically manipulate materials and move them around. Yeah, you know. Yeah, sexy. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Easy to answer. This is a question that's really... The weave paintings that I believe you're talking about from the mid-70s, you know, I do things really easy and it was just the opposite end of my paintbrush. You know, the little pointy wood end. You know, it was right there. It was, you know, not all paintbrushes are as pointy there or, you know, or some are fatter. But in general, by the time I wanted to make the scale of those marks, there were a lot of paintbrushes which were thin enough. And it wasn't like I needed a really fine point, but I needed to taper and to be thin and I found that's what I used. If those paintings had gotten larger, and most of them were not, they were small. I mean, some were this small, some were this small. I mean, there was only one that was really larger. If I tried, because there's a lot of... I mean, it's like, they're very interesting paintings today that are very much in conversation with what I do now. And like I said, very much, you know, there's been a lot of this because a lot of revisiting of 70s feminist art was about women's traditional arts and so forth. There's not a lot of revisiting of painting. So these actually were kind of ahead of their time or, I don't know, just they haven't been addressed because they don't look stereotypically feminist. They look like monochrome paintings, which they are. But that background of the weaving was important and if I had taken it larger, which I really had no impulse to do at the time, I don't know that if I would have needed to use bigger, the ends of bigger brushes or not because it isn't, as you well know, it isn't always about scaling up. So it might have just been a bigger field still with the little mark. The grommeting, I always put the grommets in first and so the grommets do not get smashed in the press. I sit there and I have this wonderful Twin Rocker paper that I use which has what I call this radical decal edge. We can call it radical decal or extreme decal. Those are my terms. You can't look them up, okay? And it's fabulous because it looks like a mouse shoot it or something like that. And it's also suitcase size. So I can take it when I travel. It's my suitcase art, okay? And so what I do is if I'm going somewhere, I just go in the studio and I do a hand grid. I don't measure it out, so they're all a little off. And I just grommet the paper. And then I'm taking empty white paper with its radical edge to, with the holes, grommet holes in it to wherever I'm going. And then I can paint on it. I can put it through a press. Generally speaking, I don't put those, well, I did this last time. I'm careful because I don't want to wreck somebody's press, obviously, with something like grommets in there. But this was what was so great working with Marina and Kona is she came to my studio, we were going to print together, and I said, hey, you know, do you, can we do grommets? And she went right for it right away and was totally into it. But she knows how to adjust the press and do everything to compensate. So they were already smashed before they went through the press. But even as she was doing it every now and then, she would sort of say, oh, another one just popped or something like that. So it happened a tad, you know, a little bit. But one could, the thing is one could grommet it afterwards. I mean, there's no reason you can't. But I like, the grommeting did, again, it was materials in process. So part of what happened, what you visually saw happened because the grommets were there beforehand. So you noticed how around the openings, there's a kind of aura. I mean, they're almost anus-like, right? You know, with this kind of radiating marks out from the holes. And that happens because it's going through the press and the grommets are in there. Also, as any of you who've done printmaking know, that a lot of times, you know, the prints dry and they're all wrinkled, you know, or something. And these never wrinkled or anything because the grommets kind of stabilized the paper in a really nice way. So, you know, that all happened accidentally, to be honest, you know. Yeah, Amy. Monolithic abstraction or modernism is really confusing to me because the work it does might be so much of different figures from Sonia D'Alone to Milton Bresna. You know, all of these people come from what we would call modernism, abstraction, or unobjective opinion, et cetera. And they also all exist in our history. I feel like, you know, sort of, I love your work and you, I'm so interested in your, you know, way of dealing with politics and abstraction, but I'm a little bit kind of puzzled and tropical or something, but I love this sort of, you know, supposedly non-contested field, the way you describe it, you know, it seems like there's this monolith. And I don't really think that, as I understand our history, there's exactly the origins of abstraction and I feel like that they were doing all the same thing. Oh, I don't, yeah, I don't mean to conflate them together. Yeah, right. So I guess, like, I got off on a thing when I started going, like, I mean, it's not monolithic, like, you know that. Like, so that I started thinking like, well, what would, like, the way you describe it or your kind of opposition to a monolithic reading. That's true. It's more around monolithic reading of it. Yeah, right. So that aspect doesn't have that reading, like, I'm going to put it this way. Like, how would you then see that work? Would you then see a work that doesn't have a feminist historical meaning? But, like, I mean, of course you would give it one, but I mean, it doesn't present itself as that. And then you put that into your work. And like, would you then say that the feminism is years into the form and what if there was a two-person show? Well, it would be very interesting to have that opportunity, first of all, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I'm actually interested in the same question because I don't think it is, like I said, I think it's fugitive. I don't think you can quite get it, but it's kind of there and you sort of get a handle, or I kind of know, but it's not real specifically located, but I think I understand what you're saying. And what do I want to say is that, oh, one of what I liked you, what you said was like the monolithic reading of a certain, you know, tradition of painting, and that's possibly more accurate because I obviously don't think, and, you know, sometimes I talk in other situations about many of these references or shared concerns and things with many other painters. And it's strange. I'm much more interested in that work, which has a sense of materiality about it. Resnick would be obviously one. Then a history of more slick monochrome painting where it's almost about the absence of the indexical in some way, you know, or we could relate some of that work to the kind of digital seamlessness that exists now. Well, you know, like I said, I like the seams to show. And so my work is kind of in a response to that digital seamlessness. At the same time, it's very conscious, but it's not like I'm thinking of exact painters, but they're all there. And I usually try to, in most situations, not talk about that because then you just end up giving a list of names and you never have a chance to really go into that. I think it would be interesting for me to have an opportunity, you know, to show some of these works in a show with a number of resnicks and so forth. I think there are many shared things. I also think, and the reason I was talking about feminism is not so much because I want you or anybody even to do a feminist read on these, although I'm sure people can. My emphasis there was to make the point of how I got where I got. That it grew out of working with fabric. It grew out of an approach to making art which really had to do with associating content with materials and how you use them. And I got that from the feminist art movement. I mean, I did not have that in school and that was a revelation, you know. And so I and the other artists, the women's group I was in, we talked about our work that way. So that is something that comes with me and I understand most art I look at by anybody. My own analysis goes back to that kind of sense of what materials are used, how are they used and how does that bring meaning to the piece as much as, you know, signs, symbol or anything else that may or may not be there. It's even with a figurative work, I would still bring that comes to the table in terms of meaning or content. So my emphasis on the feminism is to say, you know, this wasn't about a kind of rigorous, formal, reductive kind of thing in that sense. It really, and while it does get condensed and while they are frontal and formal like modernist painting, I mean, there's so much that's shared, there's something there because people are really thinking of other things that outside world when they look at these paintings and they're not quite sure why they're thinking about these things, but they are and I feel at my best that's something I like, you know, that it calls up something outside the painting perimeter itself. The queerness is a little bit different because that I do interpret, it wasn't, I don't think of it, I don't kind of bring that to the conversation in the same way because it's not about saying how I came to, you know, painting, you know, or what some people would say would be a politically incorrect feminist practice but of course we know that's not true. And that is, the queerness really has to do with the surface in a color and it really started with the dark paintings where you're not sure what color it is and you're not even quite sure where the surface is located and they begin to see metallic sometimes even though there's no metallic paint in them. And so and of course like a lot of painting they shift as you move or light or whatever but that notion, a concept of fugitive in many ways, in many ways we could interpret the word was just my terminology that I liked because it had this kind of outlaw sense to it which was different than just saying well the surface was indeterminate, you know. But you can't, I think the experience is that people, I have this when I show them people will stand in front of them, painters will stand in front of them and they'll ask well how did you make this? And I always thought that was the strangest comment. I mean it's like well I just painted it. I mean I wasn't trying to be smart ass it's just well I just painted it. But then I began to realize that there was something about them that people weren't sure how they were painted and in reality there's nothing, there's no gimmick. There's nothing special in the paint. I'm not building up an acrylic modeling paste surface and putting one skin of oil paint over it. They are built like the wrapped sculptures built out of themselves layer upon layer until I get what I want basically. So that notion of I think there's a queerness in that. In other words you know where is queerness located? It's here, it's there, you can't quite grab onto it. You know and that's exactly the point. At the same time it is exactly itself. So that's how I interpret that. But that's sort of after the feminist discourse or discussion around the work for me is to say how it came to be how I got to this place and how I think about painting as much as I think about any art practice in a certain way. I think that there's other very interesting discussions to be had but they shouldn't be had by me. That would be for people to talk about the work and compare or do that kind of writing about my work and somebody else's work. What's similar, what's different, what happens? Cross time, space, scale. I mean I just even realized you know I mean it's like yeah I mean those kind of things could be very very interesting. I haven't had the opportunity to explore that a whole lot. But I do know I'm much more akin to you know a whole slew of artists where it's a sense of materiality and artists working back in the 50s and 60s more than early early modernist and more than the slew of monochrome paintings out there which like I said my paintings kind of don't behave themselves. They don't do what monochrome paintings are supposed to do. You just sit there on the wall. They come into your space in some kind of funny way. That's a hard thing to talk about. I mean notion of presence in painting is like loaded you know and it's a hard thing to talk about but I do aim for that. I'm sorry it was a long answer. John, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well I wouldn't even say that you know it isn't like we thought it was monolithic. I mean I just wouldn't reduce all these artists to that at all at all at all. But I think there was a reaction going back to the time and you're saying the time was kind of important. Well it was because among many women artists who were becoming and identifying consciously intentionally as feminist artists there was this reaction and as you know many women artists hightailed it out of painting like heaven forbid you know like that is a masculinist site. It wasn't theorized then we didn't use the word theory then but it was what was happening so you had an examination of marginalized creative practices like needlework women's traditional arts the decorative arts you know hence pattern and decoration movement and so forth and a run-to-dance performance video and even photography because they didn't have that huge tradition of painting so there weren't there wasn't a lot of painting by self-identified feminists at that time for that reason unless it was artists who were working figuratively and then they tended to do a kind of revisionist historical painting very often of turning the tables or something but for those of us and it was true a lot in lower Manhattan that again you know it was a everybody was working with materials and process that was in the air that was not gender-based but feminists did a certain brought gender to that kind of to the conversation and the awareness of materials very definitely and then and what that did is it wasn't only an awareness to those materials feminists really brought content into the discourse at that time you couldn't talk of you know they feminists are the ones who said we must just deal with content you know and then it it's kind of continued since then it was hugely important sure oh well you know he didn't even mention it back then really I mean people knew no I didn't have a clue then and I wasn't out myself I was a student in Minnesota and no I just saw his I mean and I actually saw actual Rauschenberg's because of the Walker Art Center you know I was very lucky to be living in a place while there was no help in terms of you know gay lesbian queers who were struggling with their lives I'm talking pre-liberation pre-gay liberation pre-women's liberation I mean it was hard in Minneapolis and my husband was gay so and I was or wasn't but I didn't know it okay so we were struggling we had no help there was no Rauschenberg was not out there as a gay artist that we could identify in some way with he was an artist and my aesthetics and expressionist sensibilities I like that his early the materiality of the early work I think the other thing that I really spoke to me was just his you know the sense of combine and finding materials on the street and putting them in the work that was something that even then even though I wasn't doing that I really liked a lot and of course now when we go back there's this whole discussion obviously of you know well some people get very frustrated trying to read content into all those found things that he put into the paintings and other people do a whole analysis on that but I wasn't there at all it was just you know I liked I like the way the guy painted you know and I saw them physically and that had to do with the Walker Art Center where I actually even worked part-time I mean just a little menial job but I really saw those paintings and then by the time he moved on to bringing in really which were you know kind of the precursor to a lot of postmodern work and he's bringing in you know the silk screen images in the painting and then combining the little images with bringing you know printed matter and found photographs and something into the work then you know we kind of separated out but that early aesthetic that early sense of materiality was there and I have other paintings which are definitely student paintings but which actually honor or pay homage to some of his work some white paintings actually yeah so I was I was aware that I was looking at his work yeah okay yes I'll repeat breathing I thought that and the surfaces of your work so much of these works I've thought were human very alive maybe that's tournament I don't know but the light in the work and the sense of all the surfaces all the openings and go through access they were great I like that thank you one more will what what oh you would be one of those guys how'd you make that painting huh yeah right no there's just under color of paint it happens it usually just happens and I choose to leave it or not leave it I know it's rare it's rare that I intentionally make it happen but but sometimes that sometimes I do but it's rare mostly it's under layers of paint and since like I said it's not about building a surface and then there's painting over it it's just they take the time take it's about the layering the acute notions of accumulation and just building the surfaces up what starts happening is and as many painters know so you're putting you're applying paint with your brush whatever paint whatever brush and you know directionality of brush strokes for instance plays a huge role in terms of how paint sits on a canvas you know how light hits the directionality of the brush strokes is crucial so again I'm kind of peripherally knowing that and working out of that but as I layer each layer collects and you know there's the bristles leave a tracing in the in the paint so the next layer of paint catches on that and the next one catches on that on that and then depending the directionality of the strokes which is a whole thing painters don't really talk about that I mean it gets kind of esoteric the directionality of the strokes the pressure the pressure of the paint brush but every painter knows those are really crucial things you know but we it just is kind of like I said very detailed thing to talk about yeah right I I deal with that all the time sure I mean I mean most artists who put themselves out there with any sort of identity other than I'm an artist you know is always dealing with that in some way and I mean you can choose to deal with it how you want I I feel because I'm in a place where I get to speak and I have a visibility that it's important to speak as a feminist and as a queer lesbian you know at the same time I am very interested in opening up and having discussions about well what the hell does that mean you know or what does it mean when you put it together with the word painter or artist or whatever but that's an interesting discussion you know and so I choose and this is just my choice to use labels because they do give some indication of something but I also believe that labels don't have to be limitations or boxes in any way unless you let them be so I will my choice is to use them and try to you know push out from them in some way and not let them be boxed in for me or hopefully not for anyone else but but yeah it's a battle all the time and most of us who have are you know part of one kind of marginalized group or another you know we're always kind of categorized that way you know and and it's kind of we have to constantly reassert the full self at the same time we want to talk we want to talk about the role of difference in our lives and our work but it's not the only way to talk about it because there are multiple narratives there are multiple conversations so this work can be my work could be the narratives could be feminist art queer art it could be modernist painting it could be monochrome painting it could be thick painting it could be there are all kinds of conversations out there and what I hate is the re and that's why I really I was I was interested in Amy's comment because I don't just as I don't want feminist art or queer art to be reduced to stereotypes I also really don't want to do what we're calling modernist painting to you know to conflate it all either but it's just kind of there's so much of it it's hard to do and to talk about it in more specifics but I'm you know when there are very simplistic notions of what constitutes feminist art it's like that's not my experience it's just not my experience and so you know then you're in another conversation about how feminist art was done in Los Angeles versus in New York very very different and it had to do with the climate here the climate there so we those of us who know better have to just continue to address that I feel I don't know I just do what I do okay one more could be well I think that's I think many people would have that response but you know there are so many viewers and so actually there are people who respond like you do and I'm glad that you have that response and then there are other people let's just say who are really they look a lot at abstract work or abstract painting by let's say other women who identify as feminist or you know queer artists or something and there are ways and signifiers in there that people begin to do a visual analysis that they can interpret so it's like in a way there are codes or something within the monochrome field and there are little things so how do you know what does that notion of painting under stress or near monochrome mean I mean there are these I choose my words very carefully and I choose what I do in the painting very carefully and so I think that some of that is you know people can read not everybody and it doesn't mean that there works any lesser for people or that it's you know secretive or that it's just that if you're looking at a lot of work say by feminist abstract painters you look differently than you do and say figurative work by feminist painters and you may begin to even find something a little different than abstract monochrome work by men I don't know it's interesting if you believe you bring the artist brings their full self into the work well then we would assume it's in there somewhere somehow is it on the surface probably not you know hey guys thanks