Ann Hamilton is an American Artist with the poetic touch of Walt Whitman and the American Pragmatism of John Dewey and William James. By adding a sense of wonder to her democratic installations, time is bought for her messages to wave over the audience and land in the present moment. She wants her audience to look and think about the architecture, the materiality, and the message without prejudice.

Hamilton’s art career began in fiber arts—through time, the written word took on importance. As she said, “the literal thread that runs through her work is the relationship between text and textiles”. In her 2020 exhibition named Sense, we hear a recording of virtuosic whistling, we see scanograph images of birds, stones, cloth, and fallen leaves, and collages of fabric with text. The images and sounds come from various other past projects and become part of a new book by the same name.

In one of Hamilton’s largest installations, The Event of a Thread, she used memory as a transformative act. For a time, it transported us out of the digital age into treasured thoughts of the neighborhood. Through collected actions, we elevated the whole idea of community again—not as a tribal unit, but as an important part of humankind. Ann Hamilton describes The Event of a Thread this way, “As a bird whose outstretched wings momentarily catch the light and change thought’s course, we attend the presence of the tactile and, perhaps most importantly—we attend to each other. If on a swing, we are alone, we are together in a field. This condition of the social is the Event of a Thread. Our crossings with its motions, sounds, and textures are its weaving; is a social act.” See The Event of a Thread here.

In Myein, Hamilton’s 1999 Venice Biennale piece, she used the American Pavilion to shed light on America’s racism and its influence all over the world. The visitors had stepped outside the typical pattern of experiencing art and became part of it. As they left this pavilion, they took the American democracy story with them. Throughout the international biennale, fuchsia dust-stained shoe prints appeared everywhere. This philosophical artist explained, “I created the installation Myein as a meditation and lamentation on those aspects of American social history that, like weather, are present and pervasive in effect but which remain invisible or unspoken. My self-given task was to make a space in which this absence could be palpably felt and to create a space simultaneously empty and full.”

Hamilton is an interdisciplinary installation artist using performance collaborations, physical objects, photography, prints, video, and audio to construct her site-specific works. She is an avid reader and researcher studying literature, philosophy, history, culture, language, and archeology. Hamilton is a Distinguished University Professor at Ohio State University. Her definition of artist: “Artists take the thing that’s there and we try to bring it back up to the surface the same way that needle might carry a red thread up. And we seesaw, always, between the visible and the invisible. Two things that were once separated are now joined and so something has been transformed.”

Ann Hamilton is represented by Solway Gallery and Elizabeth Leach Gallery,

To learn more about Hamilton, please visit her Website.

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