Harmony Hammond is an artist, art writer, and independent curator who lives and works in Galisteo, New Mexico. A pioneer of the feminist art movement, she lectures, writes and publishes on feminist art, lesbian art, and the cultural representation of “difference”.

Hammond attended the University of Minnesota from 1963-67 (B.A., 1967). In 1969, she moved to Manhattan where she was a co-founder of A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York, (1972), and co-editor of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics, (1976). 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 (Tucson), from 1988-2005. Currently she teaches classes and workshops from time to time as a Visiting Artist at: Skowhegan, Anderson Ranch, the Santa Fe Art Institute and the Vermont Studio Center.

She has had over 30 solo exhibitions and her work has been shown internationally in venues such as Site Santa Fe; New Museum, NYC; Smack Mellon Studios, Brooklyn; National Academy Museum, NYC; Bronx Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, Queens; Tucson Museum of Art; The Downtown Whitney Museum, NYC; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, NC; White Columns, NYC; Brooklyn Museum; Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Internacional Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; The American Center, Paris; Neue Galerie, Graz, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Havana; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; and the Haags Gementemuseum, the Hague.
Her work is represented by Dwight Hackett projects, in Santa Fe.

Her work has been reproduced, discussed, and reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Art Forum, Art News, Art Papers, Art on Paper, The Art Journal, Arts Magazine, the New Art Examiner and many other publications.

Hammond’s work is in the permanent collections of many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, the Brooklyn Museum; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Phoenix Art Museum; the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Santa FE, NM; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CN.

Her book Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art & the Martial Arts, (TSL Press, 1984), a classic on 70s feminist art, is out-of-print. Her ground-breaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (Rizzoli, 2000) received a Lambda Literary Award.

The 100 Picture Challenge is a Flickr group hosted by Craft Revolution. Like a scavenger hunt through your own creativity, the challenge is simply to take a picture that represents each of 100 various themes. The themes range from emotions to characters common in movies, such as vampires.

Artists and crafters, feel free to create a piece of artwork or an item you have crafted that matches the theme and upload a picture of it!

Here are the challenge rules:

1.) Take 100 pictures, each picture having one of the themes listed on the group website. Each picture should have ONE and only ONE theme to it.

2.) There is no time limit on the challenge, so have fun

Once you have a picture ready for the challenge, simply submit it to the group. When you’ve completed all 100, start a discussion and show off your challenge set!

We look forward to seeing everyone’s interpretations of the themes!

Here’s an inspirational picture to get you started:

Theme: #34, Patriotism

Hitch your Wagon by Judy Chicago.
Sprayed Acrylic, Applique & Quilting.
54 in x 54 in

Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career now spans four decades. Her work and life are models for an enlarged definition of art, an expanded role for the artist, and a woman’s right to freedom of expression. She was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1939.

Her influence both within and beyond the art community is attested to by her inclusion in hundreds of publications throughout the world. Her art has been frequently exhibited in the United States and internationally.

During the period from 1965-1973, Chicago explored color through much reduced geometric shapes by producing sculpture, drawings, and paintings that comprised her Minimal period. These works were formulative to her landmark “spectral color” theory that has informed all of her subsequent work.

In the early seventies, after a decade of professional art practice, Chicago pioneered Feminist Art and art education through unique programs for women at California State University, Fresno, and the California Institute of the Arts where she helped establish the Feminist Art Program which resulted in Womanhouse, the first installation demonstrating an openly female point of view in art. Chicago’s ideas helped to initiate a worldwide Feminist Art Movement.

In 1974, Chicago turned her attention to the subject of women’s history to create her most well-known work, The Dinner Party, executed between 1974 and 1979 with the participation of hundreds of volunteers. This monumental multimedia project, a symbolic history of women in Western Civilization, has been seen by more than one million viewers during its 16 exhibitions held at venues spanning six countries.

The Dinner Party has been the subject of countless articles and art history texts. In 2007, The Dinner Party was permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum as part of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, thereby achieving Chicago’s long-held goal of helping to counter the erasure of women’s achievements.

From 1980 to 1985, Chicago worked on the Birth Project, in which she designed a monumental series of birth and creation images for needlework which were executed under her supervision by skilled needle workers around the country.

Later, in a series of drawings, paintings, weavings, cast paper, and bronze reliefs, Chicago brought a critical feminist gaze to the gender construct of masculinity, in a project entitled Powerplay. The artist’s long concern with issues of power and powerlessness, and a growing interest in her Jewish heritage led her to her next body of art, the Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, which premiered in October, 1993. Selections from the Holocaust Project continue to be exhibited.

In the late 1950s, many Latinos who lived in Los Angeles were forced out of their homes to make way for the East L.A. freeway interchange. The Gutierrez family was uprooted twice during the highway construction. Such uprooting was akin to the experience of those families in Chaves Ravine to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium.

Gutierrez was a mother and homemaker who worked to make the community safer by being involved in a network of parents who started neighborhood watch and sports boosters programs throughout Boyle Heights. Then, in 1984, when she learned that a proposed prison was to be built near her home, she decided that she had had enough. She began knocking on her neighbors’ doors, asking them to join her in taking action to protect her community. It was the beginning of her direct and dynamic political activism which resulted in forming Madres de Este Los Angeles (MELASI).

MELASI got its name because the at-home mothers were the only ones available to be the voice of East L.A. residents at the hearings, which were held during the day when others were at work. MELASI appealed directly to mothers as part of their outreach strategy. They asked, Are you ready to defend and protect your family? Their motto was, “Not economically rich, but culturally wealthy. Not politically powerful, but socially conscious. Not mainstream educated, but armed with the knowledge, commitment, and determination that only a mother can possess.

Before MELASI was formed, corporations found it easy to get rid of their wastes in the Latino community by using smoke-and-mirrors tactics. Having MELASI in the courtroom made all the difference. First, they defeated the prison proposal and saw a bill passed that declared no state prisons could be built in Los Angeles County. However, no sooner was that mission accomplished than MELASI discovered that East L.A. was being targeted for a municipal waste incinerator and an oil pipeline that was routed 20 extra miles through East L.A. so as to miss the affluent beach communities. MELASI became effective in defeating a proposed toxic dump and oil pipeline in the vicinity of thousands of residents. MELASI also helped with the problems of crime, unemployment, failing schools, dangerous working conditions, and pesticide-filled foods.

The organization became proactive and established a scholarship fund that gave in excess of $300,000 to local students. They established a water conservation program that employed twenty-two community members with benefits and established a community garden among their many projects.

Under Gutierrez’s passionate leadership, MELASI also became a model for other mothers to form community environmental justice action groups throughout the country. Her work has been featured in the former Soviet Union, Australia, and Europe as well as in numerous books. Her archives are part of the Urban Archive Collection at the California State University, Northridge.

March 2008 is National Women’s History Month

Each year, March is designated as National Women’s History Month to ensure that the history of American women will be recognized and celebrated in schools, workplaces, and communities throughout the country. The stories of women’s historic achievements present an expanded view of the complexity and contradiction of living a full and purposeful life.

The knowledge of women’s history provides a more expansive vision of what a woman can do. This perspective can encourage girls and women to think larger and bolder and can give boys and men a fuller understanding of the female experience.
Women’s Art: Women’s Vision Theme

To honor the originality, beauty, imagination, and multiple dimensions of women’s lives, the National Women’s History Project has chosen Women’s Art: Women’s Vision as the 2008 theme for National Women’s History Month.

The history of women and art is quintessential women’s history. It is the story of amazing women’s accomplishments acclaimed at the time but written out of history. Join us in ensuring that their accomplishments are never forgotten.

This year’s theme provides a special opportunity to discover and celebrate women’s visual arts in a variety of forms and mediums that help expand our perceptions of ourselves and each other.

This month, CraftRevolution.com will feature each of the women celebrated through this program in a special Blog Post, allowing our readers to learn about each of them and to pull inspiration from their achievements.

To ensure that a diversity of art and artists are represented, the 2008 Honorees were selected based on their art, their vision, their art form, their cultural background, the region in which they live and the quality and passion of the nomination submitted. Stay tuned for more information on the honorees.

Judy Chicago - 1939
Painter/Printmaker/Tapestry/Needlework

Harmony Hammond -1944
Painter

Edna Hibel – 1917
Colorist, Painter, Stone Lithographer, Serigrapher, Etcher, Sculptress, and Filmmaker

Lihua Lei – 1966
Multimedia Installation

Violet Oakley –1874-1961
Muralist, Stained Glass Artist

Rose Cecil O’Neill – 1874-1944
Painter, Illustrator, Sculptress

Faith Ringgold – 1930
Painter/Quilter

Miriam Schapiro – 1923
Print/ Painter

Lorna Simpson – 1960
Artist

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith –1940
Painter/Printmaker

Nancy Spero – 1926
Painter

June Claire Wayne – 1918
Painter/Lithographer

Creative marketing methods can seem so difficult to find.  It isn’t often that I stumble across great marketing methods, but today I found one in the Craft Revolution Flickr Group. A post by fantazya fantazies led me to her website, where I found this:

I need the collaboration of artists around the world who want to promote their art. Each page will correspond to a day and will be designed by an artist. This is a free publication and each participant will get the diary at almost the cost price.

Idea: you can make a handmade cover and give it like a present, or resale it with your handmade cover. I will print them on beautiful paper but I didn’t choose it yet. Keep coming on that page to see the evolution of the project.

What a great idea! The concept of collaborative visual art and design as a marketing tool is wonderful.  Have you collaborated on projects in the past that brought you business? If so, please feel free to leave a comment and tell us about it!

Here’s something interesting I found on AssignmentZero that shares other locations for ‘community art’:

WikiPainting: Anyone can edit a picture: artists collaborate on a never-ending sketch. Read NewAssignment.Net’s current coverage.

Aaron Koblin’s TheSheepMarket.com. Composed of 10,000 sheep from 10,000 artists, gathered via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

SwarmSketch. A “collective drawing.”

We Feel Fine - this “artwork authored by everyone” is a collaborative database of several million human feelings that is increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.

Do you know of other community art pieces we can use to express our creativity? If so, drop us a line!

Recycled Rocket Ship

Originally uploaded by lunafate ? natural magic.

For me, one of the best things about being crafty is the ability we have to reuse and transform things that others would think of as trash into fun new items. Another added benefit is the near-limitless supply of inexpensive toys for those creative enough!

Here’s a project my son recently finished- a ‘Recycled Rocket Ship’ made from cans, a fruit punch jug, a plastic cup from a gas station, some reclaimed yarn, paint and a bit of electrical tape.

What cool crafts have you made out of ‘trash’? We’d love to see!

Dolls

Originally uploaded by Eleonora Dobbin.

Lately I’ve found myself drawn to items with bold, vibrant colors. A perfect example are these great dolls From Eleonora Dobbin (as seen in the Craft Revolution Flickr Group).

I was thinking about that today as I planned a batch of soap and realized that I crave bright colors yet craft with natural, earthy tones. Is that odd?

Do you have a color set that draws your attention? How does it relate to your crafts?

While attending Craft Congress I had the amazing pleasure of meeting the creative duo behind Thread Heads. I’m still puzzled by the fact that I had to travel hours and hours on a plane to meet them when they live just a hop, skip and a jump down the state (doesn’t that say something about the state of the craft community in Florida?). Anyway, they rocked the Congress in their Revolutionary gear (Loved it!) and included their visit in the latest edition of their show.

I’m currently lobbying to have a creative gathering on a smaller scale (Hello! Florida Craft Mafias, Indie Designers and Crafters- Let me know whats up, when and where you want to meet!) and I can tell you that I’m going to do whatever it takes to get this fun couple contributing.

Corinne and Rob are so inspiring and fun to watch, you might as well plan on spending the day checking out all the past episodes. Don’t you dare fast forward through those commercials, though! They are a bit of creative genius in and of themselves!

Most of us have blogs through Wordpress, Blogger or a similar service. Most of us also upload our photographs to a service like Photobucket or Flickr.

For creative folks who want to share their images, these services can be rather limiting. Enter Scrapblog.com. From the website:

We created Scrapblog because we wanted to go beyond sharing our photos and videos online. We made Scrapblog drag-and-drop-easy so that everyone can tell their stories and create beautiful multimedia scrapbooks.

Our goal is to enable everyday people to express themselves online in a creative way. We’ve been developing Scrapblog for over two years. However, what you see online today is only the beginning.

I browsed a few of the public scrapblogs and was hooked. I admit it, the gnome in Miami reeled me in.

It was cute. It looked fun. I tried it out. Creating the pages was easy and fun. It pulled the photos from my Flickr account and let me use a template or even add my own graphics. I made my little scrapblog by using templates provided by the website, yet it still looks different from everyone elses.

Hurray to Scrapblog for giving us something fun to do with all those photographs we upload- and for taking some of the expensive out of scrapbooking!

drought relief - felt art

Originally uploaded by a little bit of just because.

I found this image in the Craft Revolution group on Flickr. It was posted with a message about the drought they are experiencing in Australia.

The art really struck me; the color grabbed my attention and the text on the back reeled me in. Perhaps it is because of the water restrictions we’re experiencing here in our own area, or maybe it is simply the concept of crafting our environments that really appeals to me.

It led me to wonder; are any other crafty artists using their creations as a way to make a statement about the time and place where they live?

And so I’m asking- do you have art or crafts that are similar to this? What inspired you to make them? Feel free to post pictures and stories in the comments section. I look forward to reading any replies.