Multiple Orgasm, 1976, by Barbara Hammer. Image courtesy of the Barbara Hammer Estate and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Queer|Art and The Museum of Modern Art team up for their first co-presentation on Wednesday, November 13th at 7pm with “The Hammer Mix: Decades,” a special evening of screenings and conversation organized in honor of legendary artist and filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), whose prolific creative career spanned more than six decades. The program includes a screening of short films made across those decades and will explore some of Hammer's many diverse creative interests, including love and intimacy, travel and human connection, and the art and politics of dying. N. Scott Johnson will perform a special live accompaniment to Hammer’s 2018 film “Evidentiary Bodies”. A post-screening conversation with film historian Sarah Keller, artist A.K. Burns, and 2018 Hammer Grant Winner Miatta Kawinzi, moderated by program curator Vanessa Haroutunian, will consider Hammer's influence on past, present, and future generations of artists.
“One of the greatest gifts Barbara gave us, beyond the astonishing quantity of inventive and challenging work she produced in her decades’ long career, was her eagerness to work collaboratively and her passion for creative exchange across generations of queer artists and curators," Haroutunian writes. "Barbara’s legacy, her boundless energy and imagination, and the embodied sense of fearlessness she put out into the world continues to push conversations forward and inspire new generations of artists."
“The Hammer Mix: Decades” coincides with the announcement of the winner of the third annual Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, which Haroutunian manages as a program of Queer|Art. The Hammer Grant is one of several awards Queer|Art gives out as part of its larger mission to connect and empower generations of LGBTQ+ artists.
Learn more about the Barbara Hammer Grant here
The Hammer Mix: Decades
Program Details
Vital Signs. 1991. By Barbara Hammer. Image courtesy of the Barbara Hammer Estate and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Wednesday, November 13 at 7pm
The Museum of Modern Art - Titus 1 Theater
Use The Ronald S. and Jo Carole Lauder Building entrance, east of the main entrance on 53rd Street.
Screening program approx. 60 minutes. Curated by Vanessa Haroutunian.
A post-screening conversation with film historian Sarah Keller, artist A.K. Burns, and 2018 Hammer Grant Winner Miatta Kawinzi will consider Hammer's influence on past, present, and future generations of artists.
Film Lineup
Clay I Love You II. 1968-69. By Barbara Hammer. 5 min.
Multiple Orgasm. 1976. By Barbara Hammer. 6 min.
16mm print courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
Vever (for Barbara). 2019. Directed by Deborah Stratman, Camera & Voice by Barbara Hammer (1975). 12 min.
Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape. 1985. By Barbara Hammer. 13 min.
Vital Signs. 1991. USA. By Barbara Hammer. 10 min.
16mm print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
Evidentiary Bodies. 2018. USA. By Barbara Hammer. 9 min.
With live accompaniment by N. Scott Johnson.
Credits: Clay I Love You II, Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape, and Evidentiary Bodies courtesy of the Barbara Hammer Estate and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. Multiple Orgasm was preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation's Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation. Vever (for Barbara) courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape. 1985. By Barbara Hammer. Image courtesy of the Barbara Hammer Estate and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Clay I Love You II. 1968-69. By Barbara Hammer. Image courtesy of the Barbara Hammer Estate and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Participating Artists
From left to right: Vanessa Haroutunian, image by Eric McNatt for the 2017 Queer|Art Community Portrait Project; Sarah Keller, image courtesy of the artist; AK Burns, image courtesy of the artist; Miatta Kawinzi, image courtesy of the artist; N. Scott Johnson, image courtesy of the artist
Vanessa Haroutunian (Program Curator) is a producer, artist, and curator. She received her B.A. in Film & Electronic Arts from Bard College. Haroutunian recently produced three short films by queer filmmakers: “Flock” (post-production, dir. Ariel Mahler), “Skin the Wire” (dir. Erin Greenwell), and “Flourish” (dir. Heather María Ács). She has been working closely with Miranda July’s Joanie4Jackie archive for the past decade, and made a documentary on the subject in 2010 called pure&magicalpussypower, for which she received the Jerome B. Hill Award for Documentary Excellence at Bard College. From 2013-2018 she was Programs Coordinator at Queer|Art, where she currently manages the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant.
Sarah Keller (Panelist) is Associate Professor of English and Director of Cinema Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston. She has lectured and published extensively on women and film history and aesthetics. Her book Maya Deren: Incomplete Control examines the role of unfinished work through Maya Deren oeuvre (Columbia University Press, 2014), and her book Anxious Cinephilia will be released in 2020 by Columbia University Press. Her current project, Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame, is a study of the career of visual artist and experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer for Wayne State University Press's Queer Screens Series, edited by David Gerstner.
A.K. Burns (Panelist) is an interdisciplinary artist focused on the body as a site of social and political agitation, who uses video, installation, sculpture, drawing and collaboration to query the space between materiality and language. Currently at work on Negative Space, a cycle of five video installations that take speculative fiction as a point of departure. The opening episode, A Smeary Spot (2015), debuted at Participant Inc. in New York, but has also been exhibited at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in Oregon (2016) and Human Resources in Los Angeles (2017). As the artist-in-residence at the New Museum’s Spring 2017 Research & Development season, Burns debuted the second video-installation in the series, entitled Living Room (2017). As of summer 2017, Burns is in development on the third video, commissioned by EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Burns was a 2016–17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and a recipient of a Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2015. Her work can be found in several public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California.
Miatta Kawinzi (Panelist) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores the figure, the inner and outer landscape, and culture as sites of re-imagination and possibility. She works with images, objects, sound, space, the body, and language. Based in New York City, she has variously exhibited and performed her work in the US, Mexico, South Africa, France, Switzerland, Trinidad & Tobago, and Liberia, where her work is included in the Art-in-Embassies public collection in Monrovia. She has been awarded artist residencies at Red Bull Arts Detroit, Alfred University's Institute for Electronic Arts, the Cité internationale des arts (Paris), the Bag Factory (Johannesburg), the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), Beta-Local (San Juan), Greatmore Studios (Cape Town), IAAB (Basel), Flux Factory (New York City), and the SOMA Summer program (Mexico City). Additional awards include the 2018 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, a NY Community Trust Foundation Fellowship, the Kossak Travel Grant, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Recent exhibition/screening sites of her work include Red Bull Arts Detroit, the IFC Center, BRIC, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the FNB Joburg Art Fair. Exploring the intersections of social engagement and creative practice, Kawinzi also works as a community-based teaching artist and workshop facilitator and museum educator.
N. Scott Johnson (Performer) is an architect, artist and musician, whose work explores public space, performance and memory. In 2016, Johnson founded XDEA Architects, an interdisciplinary design studio based in New York. Prior to XDEA, Johnson was a Principal with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, working on projects such as The Shed, MoMA expansion and the High Line. A chance encounter with Barbara Hammer in 2013 while traveling marked the beginning of a friendship and artistic collaboration, which continued until her death this year. As a cellist and composer, Johnson explores the concepts of breath and harmonics to activate the vast space between 12 traditional tones, all inspired by jam sessions with Hammer while developing various realizations of Hammer’s Evidentiary Bodies. His visual score of Hammer’s film, Nude Walk, written and performed for the Whitney Museum of American Art installation, was published by Inpatient Press in 2018. Together, Johnson and Hammer presented 5 screenings of Evidentiary Bodies at the Berlin Film Festival in 2018, where Johnson wrote and performed Duet for Cello and Film to accompany the film score, the only live performance at the festival. As an architect, Johnson collaborated with Hammer to design an immersive, three-channel installation of the film, which was featured this summer at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio as part of the exhibit “Barbara Hammer: In This Body.”