Video Still: Barbara Hammer, Optic Nerve, 1985
16mm film transferred to video, color, sound by Helen Thorington
TRT: 16:43 minutes

Video Still: Barbara Hammer, Pond and Waterfall, 1982 16mm film transferred to video, color TRT: 14:53 minutes

Company Gallery is proud to announce the acquisition of the groundbreaking work of Barbara Hammer by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The acquisition includes two of the artist’s seminal films, “Pond and Waterfall” & “Optic Nerve”.

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. Hammer’s films have been featured at the Jeu de Paume, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Kunsthall, Oslo, Norway; Toronto Film Festival; and Pink Life Queer Festival, Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey. Recent solo exhibitions include Women I Love at Ratio 3, San Francisco in 2022; Tell me there is a lesbian forever… at Company Gallery, New York in 2021; Sisters! at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona in 2020; In this Body at the Wexner, Columbus in 2019; and Truant: Photographs, 1970 – 1979 at Company Gallery, New York in 2017. In 2017 Barbara Hammer’s retrospective Evidentiary Bodies was presented at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York. Hammer’s work was included in the 1985, 1989, 1993, and 2019 Whitney Biennials and is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC.; 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 Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant through Queer Art and the Barbara Hammer Grant in Queer Cinema at San Francisco State University. In 2021 the Estate endowed the grant at the SFSU Queer Cinema Project. Barbara Hammer was born in 1939 in Hollywood, CA and died in 2019 in New York, NY.

For more information on the Smithsonian American Art Museum please click here.