Lisa Smith

Week 4 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Harmony Hammond has spent her career doing something deceptively simple: making work anyway. Long before queer art was welcomed by institutions—or even named safely—Hammond was building a visual language rooted in feminism, materiality, and refusal. Her work doesn’t announce itself loudly, but it doesn’t yield either. Hammond emerged from the feminist art movement of the 1970s, but her practice quickly moved beyond categorization....

Week 4 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Fronted by Nai Palm, Hiatus Kaiyote make music that doesn’t settle down. Choose Your Weapon isn’t interested in being easily categorized, quickly consumed, or neatly summarized—and that’s precisely its power. At first listen, the album Choose Your Weapon — Hiatus Kaiyote can feel disorienting. Songs stretch and fold in on themselves. Time signatures shift. Melodies arrive sideways. Genres blur into one another—neo-soul, jazz, funk,...

Week 3 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Mickalene Thomas makes work that refuses to shrink. Her paintings, collages, and installations are lush, saturated, and unapologetically bold. They glitter—sometimes literally—but the surface beauty is never the point on its own. Thomas uses excess with intention. She understands adornment as power. Her work centers Black women—often queer women—in poses that recall art history while firmly rejecting its exclusions. Reclining nudes,...