Eli Neuman-Hammond, untitled, 2024, oil on canvas, 10 x 30 feet
The Al Held Foundation and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College are pleased to present persimmon, chipmunk, hickory, squash, a solo exhibition by Eli Neuman-Hammond. An artist from Providence, RI, Neuman-Hammond is a recent graduate of Bard’s MFA program and the second recipient of the Al Held Archive Fellowship. The exhibition of new paintings and a sound installation was informed by research in the Al Held Foundation’s archive and will be on view in Held’s former drawing studio and garage from June 15-28, 2024.
What does a western look like in New England? Is the color of grass political? With persimmon, chipmunk, hickory, squash, Neuman-Hammond presents landscape paintings from the Northeast and an altered live transmission of 97.7 WCZX-FM “The Wolf,” the Hudson Valley’s contemporary country radio station. Neuman-Hammond takes up themes that Al Held wrestled with throughout his oeuvre—how color, scale, and perspective affect people's experience of space. While Held enlisted these elements in his encyclopedic spatial abstractions, Neuman-Hammond uses them to probe genealogies of perception specific to North American space. In the garage, eleven small paintings of stones are adhered to wooden columns. These columns support the gallery above, where a massive 10 x 30 foot site-specific painting of a highway hangs unstretched. Stacks of blueish-green shapes lean against the walls. Here, the subject is the mundane architecture of colonized space—stones, slag, signs, highways. Together, the work conveys Neuman-Hammond’s view that the contortions of American landscape evidence capital’s failure to contain a land that’s full, irreducible, multilingual, and contested.
The Archive Fellowship offers the opportunity to create and present a site-responsive artwork or performance inspired by Held’s life and practice at the artist’s former studio in Boiceville, NY. The fellowship begins with an invitation to spend time in the Al Held archive, working directly with the Foundation’s archivist to conduct research or review materials that are of particular interest. The archive contains, but is not limited to, such materials as catalogs, posters, art records, studio materials, process materials, business records, and personal papers.
Neuman-Hammond’s interests led him to explore several working paintings, or maquettes, in the Al Held archive. Held’s compositional process left a scarred surface on the canvas, replete with pentimenti, scraps of tape, and hidden layers of color. Held wanted his final works to have a pristine surface, so he and his studio assistants arrived at a technique where they traced the working paintings to generate drawings, and then used these drawings to duplicate the finished composition onto a fresh support—leaving no traces of his process. Neuman-Hammond met with Gene Benson, Al Held’s long time studio manager, who generously demonstrated the process of tracing these textured working paintings. Neuman-Hammond also took interest in early work Held made when he was in France on the GI Bill in 1951—enlarged pictures of rocks that he picked up from the streets of Paris.
Eli Neuman-Hammond (b. 1995) lives and works in Providence, RI. He employs a variety of materials to raise the stakes of when and how we give attention, especially within landscapes. His sound work strategically amplifies, attenuates, filters, and resonates material to highlight listeners’ already-present attentions and inattentions. Recent paintings address the romantic American visual regime. His music has been published by edition wandelweiser and El Gallo de Oro (forthcoming), and he has performed at DIY venues throughout the US. He teaches at MassArt.
This year, the Al Held Archive Fellowship for 2024-25 was awarded to Jenny Kim and the Al Held Scholarship to Alima Lee. Special thanks to Hannah Barrett, Executive Director, Bard MFA Program.