Jane Hammond
Jane Hammond
Lab Grant Resident
“Like jumping into a fast game of Double Dutch, where four hands spin two ropes in exactingly rhythmic synchrony, opening the covers of “Be Zany, Poised Harpists / Be Blue, Little Sparrows”, induces a special kind of exhilaration. The result of an unusually close collaboration, Be Zany traces its start to a public reading during which painter Jane Hammond’s attention was especially caught by poet Raphael Rubinstein’s Six Sex. A ribald tour of the cities of Europe, the poem is driven by sensuous appetite (“Lecher weaves erotic voyage across Europe,” it begins, and governed by an almost absurdly rigorous constraint: there are six stanzas, each six lines long; each line is six words long, and each word has six letters.”
— Nancy Princenthal, Excerpt from her essay for Jane Hammond: Be Zany, Poised Harpists, Be Blue, Little Sparrows, Lab Grant Publication Series No.3, Dieu Donné.
About the Artist
Jane Hammond (b. 1950, Bridgeport, CT) is a contemporary American artist whose works probe the encyclopedic quality and meaning behind images. In one her best-known works Fallen (2004–2012), Hammond made thousands of autumnal leaves from inkjet prints, with each leaf representing a soldier killed during the Iraq War. “I think of myself as both a Conceptual artist involved with a lot of very ‘mental’ ideas and as someone who loves making things by hand,” she has explained. Born on June 27, 1950 in Bridgeport, CT, she received her BA from Mount Holyoke College in 1972 and her MFA in sculpture from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1977. That same year, Hammond relocated to New York where, in the years that followed, she collaborated with a number of writers including John Ashbery and Raphael Rubinstein. Hammond’s works are held in the collections of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others. She continues to live and work in New York, NY. (Source: Artnet)
For more information, please visit their website: http://janehammondartist.com