Estate of Barbara Hammer

Full CV (PDF)

Barbara Hammer was a feminist filmmaker, visual artist, and lesbian activist with a career spanning over fifty years — constructing revelations on gender, sexuality, community, and later illness and mortality. She produced over 90 films, ranging from experimental shorts to essays, and full-length documentaries as well as performances, installations, photographs, collages, and drawings, that illuminate lesbian histories, lives, and representations. In her work, Hammer explodes traditional notions of female sexuality by showing it for what it is: complex, messy, abstract, human.

Retrospectives of Hammer’s films include Sisters! La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona (2020); Barbara Hammer: in this Body, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2019); Barbara Hammer: Boundless, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2019); the Jeu de Paume, Paris (2012); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Tate Modern Museum, London England (2012); Kunsthall, Oslo, Norway (2013); Toronto Film Festival (2013); and Pink Life Queer Festival, Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey. Recent solo exhibitions include Available Space, Company Gallery, New York, (2023); Tell me there is a lesbian forever..., Company Gallery, New York (2021); Hammer’s retrospective, Evidentiary Bodies, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York (2017); and Truant: Photographs, 1970 - 1979, Company Gallery, New York (2017). Hammer’s work was included in the 1985, 1989, 1993, and 2019 Whitney Biennials and is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Australian Center for the Moving Image, Melbourne. She is the author of Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, Feminist Press, 2009. In 2017 Hammer’s paper archive was acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The same year she established the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant.

Barbara Hammer was born in 1939 in Hollywood, CA and died in 2019 in New York, NY.

Exhibitions

Solo Show

Available Space

Apr29Jun32023

Tell me there is a lesbian forever...

Oct2Nov62021

Truant: Photographs, 1970 – 1979

Oct22Nov262017

Lesbian Whale: Early Drawings and Paintings

Sep13Oct152015

Selected Press

Oct 15 2023

Far Out Magazine

Barbara Hammer: A pioneer of queer American surrealism

Jun 27 2023

Artsy

7 Older LGBTQIA+ Artists Who Paved the Way for the Next Generation

May 24 2023

Screen Slate

Available Space

Nov 3 2021

Art News

Layered Lesbian Looking: Barbara Hammer at Company

Nov 3 2021

The Brooklyn Rail

Barbara Hammer: Tell me there is a lesbian forever…

Oct 25 2021

Artnet

‘Curating Is Always About Desire’: Artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden on Her Exhibition Paying Homage to Revered Queer Filmmaker Barbara Hammer

Oct 20 2021

ArtForum

Barbara Hammer at Company

Sep 6 2020

Nuvol

From lesbian dissent to the Gag Law

Jun 25 2020

Rolling Stone

50 Essential LGBTQ Movies

Mar 25 2020

Hyperallergic

Quintessential Movies About California, From Its Paradises to Its Paradoxes

Mar 23 2020

Artnet

Editors’ Picks: 10 Things Not to Miss in the Virtual Art World This Week

Mar 23 2020

Artnews

For a Time of Staying In, 23 Artworks to See and Hear Online

Mar 1 2020

Artforum

Barbara Hammer

Oct 15 2019

Hyperallergic

A Film Festival a Stone’s Throw Away From the Beach

Sep 6 2019

Garage

Word Play and Women's Work with Eve Fowler

Aug 16 2019

The Los Angeles Times

For these 20 women artists, ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Dyketactics’ are just the beginning

Jul 19 2019

Hyperallergic

Barbara Hammer: Superdyke Surveys Her Iconic Role in Queer Experimental Film

Jul 18 2019

New York Times

7 Film Series to Catch in N.Y.C. This Weekend

Jun 25 2019

GQ

The Re-released Paris Is Burning Brings Us into the Future

Jun 13 2019

Art Newspaper

Three exhibitions to see in New York this weekend

May 1 2019

Artforum

WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2019

May 1 2019

Artforum

Barbara Hammer: In This Body

Apr 10 2019

Texte Zur Kunst

BARBARA HAMMER (1939-2019)

Apr 9 2019

Independant

Barbara Hammer: Artist and filmmaker who first brought authentic lesbian love to the screen

Apr 9 2019

Artnews

Whitney Museum Acquires Works by Emma Amos, Ed Clark, Many More

Apr 4 2019

BFI Film Forever

Barbara Hammer obituary: an experimental pioneer who put lesbian life on screen

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