A.I.R. Gallery: Chapter 3

Harmony Hammond (b. 1944) is an American artist, curator, writer, activist, and a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery as well as of Heresies: A Feminist Publication of Art and Politics. 

Presences was a direct continuation of Hammond’s earlier work, which disrupted heteronormative, masculine, monochromatic grids with explicit gestures of queerness. 

Judith Bernstein (b. 1942) is a New York artist best known for her expressive feminist and anti-war drawings and paintings, including her early hardware pieces. Bernstein was one of the twenty founding members of A.I.R., and her solo exhibition in 1973 featured large-scale charcoal drawings of screws in which the phallic hardware became a symbol of patriarchy and hypermasculinity.

In 1974, Bernstein’s artwork Horizontal, a large charcoal drawing from the same series, was censored by John Pierron of the Philadelphia Civic Center from the exhibition Focus, despite approval from the all-women panel of jurors.

Mary Beth Edelson (1933-2021) was a central figure of the feminist art movement in the United States and a member of A.I.R. starting in 1975 until 1983. Edelson’s art production consisted of a hybrid of diverse media including photo-based work, painting, sculpture, drawing,  performance, silk screen, artists’ books, posters, fabric works, collages, story-gathering boxes, video, and installation. 

For this exhibition, Edelson developed one of her signature works, Death of Patriarchy / The A.I.R. Anatomy Class (1976), a gelatin silver print in which Edelson collaged the faces of A.I.R. founders and early members onto a reproduction of Rembrandt’s 1632 painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. The work was later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.  

Her work set a precedent, inviting future artists to openly protest violence, torture, injustice, and the abuse of power through artmaking.

The exhibition was conceived to assert the position of artists’ books as an artistic medium, and to display and distribute them. 

The show’s nine-page-long checklist provided each of these books’ basic details—the name of the artist, its date of creation, its size, and number of pages—as well as brief descriptor lines.

This unique way of describing books was meant to illustrate the challenge of categorizing artists’ books, which function as hybrids of conventional publications and artworks.

Her final body of work included photographs of flat sculptural string drawings constructed on a landscape, and a series in which silk organza forms were suspended in clear lucite boxes. 

The works featured were drawings and models depicting possible treatments for open public spaces on Greenwich Street from Barclay to Chambers.

It features Houses for Hereafter: Red (1988), an abstract painting of black, red, and yellow shapes vying for compositional prominence on a cracked painterly surface.

Throughout her career, Stokes Sims, a participant in both the feminist and Black art movements, has helped grow opportunities for underrepresented artists. For A.I.R.’s first biennial, Stokes Sims and a committee of A.I.R. members reviewed almost 4,000 slides of work from more than 600 artists, of which they selected twenty-six.

A variety of different styles and media were exhibited in the show and all of the work chosen engaged with powerful feminist themes. A.I.R. has had thirteen more biennial exhibitions since its first, each showcasing a range of work by artists across the United States and providing them visibility and support. The series continues to this day. 

The gallery encouraged everyone who heard about the exhibition to show their work. Artists were invited to deliver artwork to the gallery, along with a laser print of the work exhibited to be made into a document donated to the Archives of American Art.