Jane Hammond: Paper Work

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Jane Hammond: Paper Work

June 23 - August 12, 2007

The Chazen Museum of Art presents the disciplined yet wildly creative world of artist Jane Hammond in its upcoming exhibition Jane Hammond: Paper Work. Zany, mysterious, and quotidian, the forty-nine works on paper convey both thoughts and the slippery process of thinking itself. Hammond uses various techniques and materials as well as ideas and feelings to create collages of mental associations and visual stimuli. Her works make reference to board games, scrapbooks, maps, charts, books, and even three-dimensional costumes. This exhibition includes drawings in a variety of media, unique paper objects, prints, and limited edition artist's books. (right: Photo of Jane Hammond. Courtesy of the artist © 2006 Jane Hammond)

Hammond, who received her MFA from the University of Madison - Wisconsin in 1977, is a renowned artist whose works reflect her lifelong fascination with collecting, sorting, and memory. Along the way, she invented her own visual language, based on 276 images borrowed from books on everything from puppetry to beekeeping. She has described her intricate collage style as a "semiotic genome project," underscoring the endlessly varied interactions between image and viewer. "My intention was to use the lexicon of the 276 images in 'recombinant' fashion-think DNA-and let myself make any kind of work of art I wanted with them," Hammond has written.

The exhibition's centerpiece, All Souls (Masindi), is the latest in Hammond's exquisitely lifelike butterfly map series. Another exhibition highlight is Scrapbook (1000 Yen), a large open book with sewn-in Japanese paper. Affixed to the two open pages are silhouettes, paper doll-like figures, paper flowers, money, safety pins, paper necklaces, and handmade paper matchbooks. Works such as her humorously disorienting Still Life With Seal and Martin House Me will also be on view.

Jane Hammond graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1972 and went on to earn an MFA from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, in 1977. She moved to New York City in 1980 and had her first solo exhibition in 1987. She has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally ever since. Hammond's art has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, Art on Paper, BOMB, and Art News, among many other publications. Among her professional accomplishments are a number of distinguished awards, including grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Works of art by Hammond have been acquired by more than 70 museums around the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Jane Hammond: Paper Work is organized and toured by Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. A full-color illustrated catalogue, with essays by Fay Hirsch and Nancy Princenthal as well as an interview with Hammond by Douglas Dreishpoon, curator of twentieth-century art at the Albright-Knox Art Museum, will be available in the Museum Shop.

The exhibition will travel to the following venues after the exhibition closes: Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, Cornell University's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

(above: Jane Hammond (American, b. 1950), All Souls (Masindi), 2006, Acrylic, gouache, graphite, colored pencil, metal leaf, archival digital prints, horsehair, and false eyelashes on assorted handmade papers. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts, Gift of Joyce and Robert Marcus © 2006 Jane Hammond)

(above: Jane Hammond (American, b. 1950), Martin House Me, 1999, Acrylic, gouache, graphite, crayon, solvent transfers, color Xerox, linoleum block prints, lithographs, and leaf prints on collaged Japanese papers. Collection of Betsy and Frank Babb © 2006 Jane Hammond)

(above: Jane Hammond (American, b. 1950), My Heavens!, 2004, Twelve-color lithograph with silver Mylar and collage on amate paper, edition of 40, published by Shark's Ink. Collection of Bud and Barbara Shark © 2006 Jane Hammond)

(above: Jane Hammond (American, b. 1950), Still Life with Seal, 1999, Acrylic, gouache, graphite, crayon, solvent transfers, color Xerox, linoleum block prints, and rubber stamps on collaged Japanese papers. Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody © 2006 Jane Hammond)

(above: Jane Hammond (American, b. 1950), The Wonderfulness of Downtown, 1997, A thirty-nine color silkscreen with lithography and collage on collaged Japanese papers, edition of 50, published by Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts, Henry Rox Memorial Fund for the Purchase of Works by Contemporary Women Artists © 2006 Jane Hammond)

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