Jane Hammond (American, b. 1950), The Wonderfulness of Downtown, 1997. A thirty-nine color silkscreen with lithography and collage on collaged Japanese papers, edition of 50, published by Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts, Henry Rox Memorial Fund for the Purchase of Works by Contemporary Women Artists. © 2006 Jane Hammond.

de Young
Golden Gate Park
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
415-863-3330
San Francisco
Jane Hammond: Paper Work
May 3-August 31, 2008

For 20 years, Jane Hammond has been using a fixed lexicon of 276 images to create painting and work on paper, flat and three-dimensional, that layer prints, photocopies, and photographs with collage and handwork. Her vocabulary borrows from carnival costume and puppetry, instructional manuals, board games, maps and scrapbooks. Jane Hammond: Paper Work presents nearly 30 large-scale works on paper, many unique and culled from private collections.

Hammond’s visual vocabulary allows her to explore context and meaning while creating complex combinations of images that enhance the sculptural quality of the work. Hammond’s work in the exhibition includes All Souls (Hefei), from her trompe l’oeil butterfly map series; Scrapbook, a , three-dimensional open book featuring silhouettes, paper doll-like figures, paper flowers, fortunes, feathers, and paper matchbooks; and The Wonderfulness of Downtown, an editioned print combining a map of lower Manhattan, with photographic images from her neighborhood. “My intention was to use the lexicon of the 276 images in "recombinant" fashion — think DNA — and let myself make any kind of work of art I wanted with them,” says Hammond.

Jane Hammond (b. 1950) graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1972 and earned an MFA from University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1977. Her first solo exhibition was in 1987 in New York, and since then she has shown her work nationally and internationally. Works by Hammond have been acquired by more than 70 museums, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

An illustrated, catalog including an interview with Hammond by Douglas Dreishpoon, curator of 20th-century art at Albright-Knox Art Museum, accompanies the exhibition (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007, $35).

Jane Hammond, Spells and incantations, 2007, Seven color lithograph with silkscreen, gold leaf, and chine collé on heavyweight paper, Printed by Bud Shark, Shark's Ink, Smith College, Purchased with the Janice Carlson Oresman, class of 1955, Fund.

Jane Hammond (American, b. 1950), My Heavens!, 2004. Twelve-color lithograph with silver Mylar and collage on amate paper, edition of 40, published by Shark’s Ink. Collection of Bud and Barbara Shark, Lyons, Colorado. © 2006 Jane Hammond.

Jane Hammond (American, b. 1950), Scrapbook (1000 Yen), 2003. Acrylic, gouache, watercolor, linoleum block prints, rubber stamps, lithographs, digital prints, color Xerox, found plastic toy, glassine, thread, and postage stamps on assorted Japanese papers with French marbled paper, archival book board, and bookbinder’s thread. Collection of Sunny and Brad Goldberg, Mamaroneck, New York. © 2006 Jane Hammond.