Patrick Earl Hammie

Patrick Earl Hammie (born November 23, 1981) is an American painter best known for monumental portraits that adopt body language and narrative to reinvent and remix ideal beauty and heroic nudity.

Early life

Patrick Earl Hammie was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of Carolyn and Ervin Hammie Jr.[1] He was raised in West Haven, Connecticut until age nine, when he relocated with his parents to South Carolina. Following his parents' separation in 1995, Hammie and his father returned to Connecticut where he graduated from West Haven High School in 1999. After his father's death that year, Hammie returned to South Carolina to enroll at Coker College in South Carolina. In 2004 Hammie earned his Bachelor of Arts in Drawing and minor in Psychology from Coker College, and participated in his first solo exhibition. In 2006 he was awarded a Graduate Assistantship to study for a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. In 2008 he earned his Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Connecticut.


Work

Transformation is a central theme in Hammie's work. He characterizes it as “an effort to reconcile inner duality, transcend typical masculine ideals and yield to new realities that require constant compromise and change.” His paintings explore the tension between power and vulnerability and examines how male artists have historically represented themselves and the nude.[2] Coming of age in a generation that is post-Civil Rights and post-Second Wave Feminism, he has situated himself in the discourse of contemporary art that questions constructions of identity, gender politics and (mis)conceptions of race.[3]

Since 2007 Hammie has been featured in several solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. In 2008 he was awarded the Alice C. Cole Fellowship in Studio Arts from Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, which supported a year’s research and culminated in his exhibition Equivalent Exchange.[4] In 2010 he had a solo exhibition at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana and received the Tanne Foundation Award for excellence in the visual arts. In 2011 he was selected to be a resident in the Arts/Industry program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

Hammie maintains an active schedule of exhibitions, public lectures and speaking engagements at colleges and museums nationwide, and currently serves as assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Notes and references

  1. ↑ "Patrick Earl Hammie Biography". ARTNews.org. Retrieved on July 06, 2009.
  2. ↑ Wetmore, Kevin "Student Artists Hone Skills at The Benton". The Daily Campus. February 19, 2007.
  3. ↑ Kitwana, Bakari, The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture. (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002): 12.
  4. ↑ "Patrick Earl Hammie". Chelseaartgalleries.com. Retrieved on July 06, 2009.

External links