Jane Hammond & Raphael Rubinstein

I wanted to say something about Be Zany, Poised Harpists / Be Blue, Little Sparrows. And by the way, that’s a title that Raphael [Rubinstein] and I made up together, and we made it up using a two-letter word, followed by a four-letter word, followed by a six-letter word, followed by an eight-letter word, because that relates to the poems inside of the book. The four of them follow a kind of architectural pattern. When I made the artwork for the poem that has six stanzas of six lines of six words of six letters, I went first to an ephemera fair, and I bought postcards from all the towns Raphael mentions in his poem: London, Dieppe, Moscow, Crimea, Madrid. And then I made racy collages on the backs of those postcards, because Raphael’s poem is a racy poem. And then I hand colored the collages with colored pencils, so if you were to see two copies of this book, you would notice that the collages on the backs of the postcards are not exactly the same. And then I put on the postcards, on that back side, real stamps; so some postcard collages have stamps from Monaco, and some have stamps from Russia, and some have stamps from Poland, all different kinds of places. And then I had made up cancellation stamps; I got rubber stamps made and kind of forged the cancellation marks of different countries. So if you look closely sometimes, you’ll see that there’s a postcard from one place, and it has a stamp from another place. I did that because I know, myself, when I would travel and send postcards, I would oftentimes send my postcards a week later, in the next city. The first of Raphael’s poems is extremely spare and haiku-like, and I wanted to make an artwork that paralleled that. The first thought that came to my mind was, I wanted to make something that was sort of a nothing. So I made big soap bubbles, and I blew them by making my own wand, and making a mixture of soap and Karo Syrup. And then I had them professionally photographed, and we printed them on clear acetate and put them inside of these glassine envelopes. You can actually open the envelopes and take out the print, but then you see right through it and it feels, I think, very iffy, in the same way that Raphael’s poem does.

Jane Hammond (b. 1950, Bridgeport, CT) received her BA from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts (1972). She earned her MFA at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1977). A traveling exhibition of Hammond’s paper works was organized by the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts (2006). Her large-scale installation Fallen, part of the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, has traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2008); the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California (2009); and the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia (2010). Solo exhibitions recently have been held at A+D Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago (2009); the Brevard Art Museum, Melbourne, Florida (2009); the Visual Arts Gallery, University of Alabama, Birmingham (2009); Galeria Senda, Barcelona (2009); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2008-2009); Galerie Lelong, Paris (2010); FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2011); Galerie Lelong, New York (2008, 2011); Pace Prints, New York (2010, 2013); Nina Freudenheim Gallery, New York (2014); and Sims Reed Gallery, London (2014). Her most recent group exhibitions took place at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (2009); The Jewish Museum, New York (2010); the Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York (2011); the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2011, 2012); the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio (2012); The Art Institute of Chicago (2012); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2013); and the de Young Museum, San Francisco (2014). Her work may be found in the public collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Hammond lives and works in New York City. More information about her work can be found at www.janehammondartist.com.

Raphael Rubinstein (b. 1955, Lawrence, KS) is a poet and art critic whose books include Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990-2002 (Hard Press Editions) and The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces (Make Now). He edited the anthology Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice (Hard Press Editions, 2006). His book of micro-narratives, entitled In Search of the Miraculous: 50 Episodes from the Annals of Contemporary Art, has been translated into French (Editions Grèges). He previously served as Senior Editor at Art in America (1997-2007), where he continues to be a contributing editor. He currently is a Professor of Critical Studies, the University of Houston, Texas. Rubinstein was presented with the award of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (2002). His blog, The Silo, won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2010). Raphael lives and works in New York City. More information about his writing may be found on http://raphaelrubinstein.com/.