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This work is a singular collaboration between Patsy Norvell and Harmony Hammond who were friends and co-founders of A.I.R. Gallery, the first all women's gallery in the US. This work was created during the early 1970's and is representative both of Norvell's 'Ruffle Series' and Hammond's painterly mark making of this period.
Norvell's 'Ruffle Series' was reviewed by Carter Radcliff in ArtForum as well as in other publications in the 1970's but few of these works have been shown since that time. Originally the works were exhibited alongside Norvell's “hair quilts” which made use of human hair donated by the other women from the artist's consciousness raising group and circle of friends, including Harmony Hammond.
Patsy Norvell was a New York-based sculptor and public art installation artist living. Norvell was active in the women’s movement since 1969, participating in an artist conscious raising groups and helping to start others. In 1972, Norvell was invited to exhibit in 13 Women, an important, early women’s exhibit in New York which also included Louise Bourgeois. In the same year she was a founding artist of A.I.R. Gallery, the first all-women’s gallery in the United States. Norvell’s art has been exhibited widely in galleries and museums. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and artist residencies. She has lectured and taught, introducing Women in the Arts courses at Montclair State College and Hunter College in the 1970s as well as teaching mathematics at Hunter for many years. Permanent public art projects include installations at the Beverley and the Courtelyou BMT subway stations in Brooklyn, Newsstands in Manhattan, and plaza and lobby installations in Los Angles, CA; New Brunswick, NJ; Bridgeport, CT; and Bethesda, MD, among others. In 2001, the University of California Press published Recording Conceptual Art, the book form of taped interviews Norvell recorded in 1969. She received her BA in art and mathematics from Bennington College and her MA in sculpture from Hunter College.
Harmony Hammond is an artist, art writer and independent curator. A leading figure in the development of the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s, she was a co-founder of A.I.R and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics). Since 1984, Hammond has lived and worked in northern New Mexico, teaching at the University of Arizona, Tucson from 1989–2006. Hammond’s earliest feminist work combined gender politics with post-minimal concerns of materials and process, frequently occupying a space between painting and sculpture – a focus that continues to this day. Often referred to as social abstraction, her paintings which include rough burlap, straps, grommets, and rope, along with Hammonds signature layers of thick paint, engage formal strategies and material metaphors suggesting connection, restraint, agency and voice - a disruption of utopian egalitarian order, but also the possibility of holding together, of healing. In 2019, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT presented “Harmony Hammond: Material Witness, Fifty Years of Art”, a survey exhibition that later traveled to the Sarasota Museum of Art. Her work was also included in “Women in Abstraction: Another History of Abstraction”, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, (2021) which traveled to the Guggenheim Bilbao. She has also been included in major exhibitions such as “Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950 – 2019” (2019-2021); "Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age" (2015-2016); "Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution" (2007) and "High Times/Hard Times, New York Painting 1967–1975" (2006-2007).
