NEW YORK, NY.- Alexander Gray Associates presents Rust Never Sleeps, the Gallery’s seventh solo exhibition with Harmony Hammond (b. 1944). The show features a selection of large-scale paintings made within the last three years, which continue Hammond’s engagement with and disruption of Minimalist abstraction, imbuing it with latent political content and a charged material presence.

Bridging the divide between painting and sculpture, four of the canvases in the exhibition incorporate panels of rusted stamped metal, returning to a material that first entered Hammond’s work in 1988, four years after she moved from New York to New Mexico. Scavenged from dilapidated and abandoned buildings, these rusted passages hold the history of dispossession in the American Southwest, alluding to the severity of rural life and the grit required to survive it. Sharing the picture plane with these weathered overlays, Hammond’s signature grommet-studded, ripped, sutured, and overlapping pieces of painted canvas and burlap suggest both domestic textiles and a material language of concealment and political suppression.

This political charge comes into sharper focus in works such as Red Flag (2025), from which a crimson cotton rectangle—rough at the edges and seemingly blood-stained at its center—hangs like a warning. Other works register a quieter, though no less insistent social resonance through their use of textiles. In Attachments (2025), a lace-trimmed apron hangs loosely from a nail, introducing an oppositional delicacy and domesticity to the work’s formal and material weight.

The titular Rust Never Sleeps (2025) emerges from Hammond’s series of near-monochrome works. A central panel of painted burlap, gridded with grommet holes, echoes the oxidized brown of the flanking metal sheets. Borrowing its title from a 2020 review of the artist’s work by Marty Fugate and Neil Young’s 1979 album, the work reflects on time’s pressure and the creative process—the refusal of complacency. The phrase also embraces the entropy of Hammond’s “fugitive materials,” a “metaphor for the aging body,” where elemental change remains generative. As she writes, “Becoming requires unbecoming.”

This insistence that abstraction functions as a site for social meaning and that the canvas serves as a stand-in for the body is foregrounded in Samurai (2024). Part of the artist’s ongoing Cross Paintings, the work is marked by blood-red brushstrokes, gridded grommet holes, and two perpendicular black burlap straps that bisect the surface. For Hammond, the cross operates as an index of the body—reinforced by the anthropomorphic title and the orifices protruding from the painting’s “skin.” Its broader associations of intersection and plurality situate the work at the crossroads of our present political moment, invoking resistance.

Across these works, Hammond grounds abstraction in the body and its histories, treating material as both evidence and form. Rust Never Sleeps reflects a practice shaped by time and tenacity, where the marks of survival remain visible.

A survey of Hammond’s work from the past decade, Harmony Hammond: Fringe, was presented at SITE Santa Fe, NM in 2025. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Material Witness, Five Decades of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT (2019), traveled to the Sarasota Art Museum, Ringling College of Art and Design, FL (2020); and Big Paintings 2002–2005, Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM (2005); among others. Hammond has also participated in many group exhibitions, including Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Barbican Center, London, United Kingdom (2024), traveled to Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2024); Making Their Mark, Shah Garg Foundation, New York, NY (2023), traveled to Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA (2024), Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, MO (2025), and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2026); Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2023), traveled to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2024), the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario (2024), and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2025); and Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021), traveled to Guggenheim Museo Bilbao, Spain (2021), among others.

A prolific writer, Still Dangerous! The Harmony Hammond Reader, a compendium of the artist’s writings edited by Tirza True Latimer, will be published by Duke in August 2026. Hammond’s book, Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts (1984), is a foundational publication on 1970s feminist art. Her groundbreaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000) received a Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary text on the subject.