Visiting Artist Barbara Hammer

The Department of Visual Arts presents a visiting artist lecture by Barbara Hammer, a visual artist working primarily in film and video. Considered a pioneer of queer cinema, she has made over 80 moving image works in a career that spans 40 years.

Her experimental films of the 1970s often dealt with taboo subjects such as menstruation, female orgasm and lesbian sexuality. In the 80s she used optical printing to explore perception and the fragility of 16mm film life itself. Optic Nerve (1985) and Endangered (1988) were selected for the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennials (’85,’89,’93). Her documentaries tell the stories of marginalized peoples who have been hidden from history and are often essay films that are multi-leveled and engage audiences viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change. Nitrate Kisses (1992) was chosen for the 1993 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. Generations, 2010 (made with Gina Carducci), and Maya Deren’s Sink, 2011, her two most recent films, won the Teddy Award for Best Short Films at the 2011 Berlinale. In March 2010 her book, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, published by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, was launched in a performance at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York.

Her work is represented by the gallery Koch Oberhuber Woolfe in Berlin, Germany. Her many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Marie Walsh Sharpe artist studio. She has been honored with retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Chinese Cultural University Digital Imaging Center in Taipei, Taiwan, sponsored by Women Make Waves Film Festival.

She teaches each summer at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Barbara Hammer lives and works in New York City and Kerhonkson, New York.

Attendance is free.