Book excerpt: An activist and a curator as well as a trailblazing artist, feminist and lesbian scholar, New Mexico-based Harmony Hammond (born 1944) has enjoyed a career spanning nearly fifty years and many mediums, all of which are brought together for the first time in Material Witness, which accompanies the artist's museum survey of the same name at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Hammond's groundbreaking painting and installation practice unites minimalist and postminimalist concerns with feminist art strategies, employing marginalized craft traditions in the service of abstraction, and working through a wide cast of materials: fabric, rope, pine needles, hair, blood, bone and wood, mixed with traditional sculptural and painting materials. Harmony Hammond: Material Witnessrestages the most significant installations of Hammond's career and presents them alongside her major paintings, sculptures, works on paper and ephemera. Fully illustrated, and with an essay by exhibition curator Amy Smith-Stewart, this is the first and definitive monograph on Harmony Hammond and her revolutionary practice.