A native of Cincinnati, Terence Hammonds grew up in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood and attended the School for Creative and Performing Arts before studying at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His visual vocabulary fuses imagery from the decisive decades that encompass the evolution of civil rights in America. He appropriates imagery from various movements and civil rights history and combines them with decorative motifs and patterns that adorn, memorialize, and abstract histories of racial identity in America.
For this exhibition Hammonds will be pulling from complex collages made over the last few years that deftly but unabashedly meld elements that span the deeply personal and the cosmological, speaking of personal and shared histories while using elements of historically tested collage, intuition, Afrofuturism, and the decorative and applied arts. Hammonds’s collages incorporate a visual index of soul, funk, rap, and punk music along with illustrations of celestial bodies with images of Black figures cut from vintage magazines, such as Life, Jet, and Ebony, to create scenes that are simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic.
