This essay describes how the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant came into fruition, created by the pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer and administered through ...the New York City nonprofit organization Queer|Art. In 2017, Hammer approached her friend and colleague Ira Sachs to set up a grant in her honor, through the nonprofit he founded in 2009 with the mission to create a diverse and vibrant community through the support of LGBTQ+ art and artists across generations and disciplines. Author and grant manager Vanessa Haroutunian describes the process of working with Hammer to develop the grant, how Hammer's commitment to intergenerational, interdisciplinary conversation cultivated permission for future generations to break boundaries with their artwork, and how her legacy continues to be preserved through the grant's existence. Hammer's mission—to make it easier for self-identified lesbian experimental filmmakers to make work—has been upheld by Queer|Art with the generous support of Florrie Burke and the Hammer estate.
Interview with Florrie Burke Keller, Sarah; White, Patricia
Camera obscura (Durham, NC),
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In this interview, Patricia White and Sarah Keller talk with Barbara Hammer's partner for over thirty years, Florrie Burke, who in multiple ways has helped keep Hammer's work present in the art world ...after her death in 2019. In the interview, Burke discusses life with Hammer and her drive to complete projects during the last years of her life. Outlining the variety of outlets for Hammer's work after her death, Burke describes her own role in ensuring the continuation of Hammer's legacy.
No abstract availableThis article was originally published by Parallel Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, as part of The International Journal of Screendance, Volume ...3 (2013), Parallel Press. It is made available here with the kind permission of Parallel Press.
Since the 1970s, Barbara Hammer has been known for her photographs and experimental films chronicling and exploring lesbian experience. Since her 2006 diagnosis of ovarian cancer, she has ventured ...into an unflinching depiction of her own illness, aging, and dying. In "What You Are Not Supposed to Look At," a 2014 collage series collaboration with Ingrid Christie, Hammer and Christie illuminate new modes of thinking about life, illness, and what we are describing the prismatic gaze: a mode of looking that subverts objectification and objectivity by positing sensuality, relationality, and spectacularity.
This personal essay articulates filmmaker Lynne Sachs's experiences working with experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Sachs conveys the journey of her relationship with Hammer when they were both ...artists living in San Francisco in the late 1980s and 1990s and then later in New York City. Sachs initially discusses her experiences making
(US, 2018), which includes Hammer, the conceptual and performance artist Carolee Schneemann, and the experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson. She then discusses her 2019 film,
, which uses material from Hammer's 1998 artist residency in a Cape Cod shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds, and kept a journal. In 2018, Hammer began her process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds, and writing from the residency to Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Sachs explores Hammer's experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a way to be in dialogue with both Hammer and her audience. This essay provides context for the intentions and challenges that grew out of both of these film collaborations.
Hammertime Lange, Jennifer
Camera obscura (Durham, NC),
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This memoir recounts Barbara Hammer's relationship to the Wexner Center for the Arts and its Film/Video Studio residency program, which supported a number of her films between 1994 and 2018. It ...offers some personal insight into the evolution of Hammer's final work,
(2018), from single-channel video to multichannel video installation. The author describes working with Hammer during the last year of her life and explains the process of organizing the 2019 exhibition
at the Wexner Center for the Arts, which premiered the installation of
and included additional works in other mediums and made throughout Hammer's career around themes of illness, aging, and death.
Ephemeral/Material Davis, Rosemary K. J.
Camera obscura (Durham, NC),
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This piece examines the transfer of Barbara Hammer's archive to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The archivist working with the collection highlights the complex ...emotions involved with this process and reflects on how her own archival work was influenced by Hammer.
In the year before her death in 2019, Barbara Hammer gave footage from four incomplete projects as well as funds she had procured from the Wexner Center for the Arts to four fellow filmmakers to use ...as they wished. Her footage of a Guatemalan marketplace and women weaving was given to Deborah Stratman, whose film
(US, 2019) combines the work of two of her artistic predecessors, Hammer and Maya Deren. Making use of the footage Hammer shot in 1975 as well as passages, images, and sound from Deren's work, Stratman creates a film that underlines several tendencies of feminist experimental art and continues the legacy of all three women's art. Cooperative, collaborative, and productively fragmented, it honors the creative lineage of which it is a part.
Conjuring Barbara Street, Mark
Camera obscura (Durham, NC),
12/2021, Letnik:
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This personal essay remembers the filmmaker's encounters with Barbara Hammer as teacher, mentor, and friend. It traces the production of
(dir. Mark Street and Barbara Hammer, US, 2019), a film that ...considers Hammer's epistolary relationship with the poet Jane Brakhage.
Lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer turned from experimental filmmaking to feature-length documentaries in the early 1990s. These late documentaries illustrate her distinct perspective on queer history ...and affect, which was influenced by 1970s lesbian feminism and queer scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s. Her structure and style in these films draw on the tools of both conventional historical documentaries and experimental film. Offering an astonishing range of evidence, Hammer creatively presents queer plenty from the margins of the archive. Through this evidence, Hammer affirms past queer lives, celebrating and highlighting rebelliousness, agency, creativity, queer kinship, and passion. Additionally, Hammer attempts to communicate with and embody the past, physically and emotionally seeking out and feeling the interior and exterior lives of her biographical subjects, who are predominantly creative women, including the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the Dada artist Hannah Höch, the surreal photographer Claude Cahun, and the painter Nicole Eisenman.
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