Art by Allison Janae Hamilton
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Aunjanue Ellis: So in 2018, I was in this weird apartment in the financial district, completely away from everybody and everything I understood about New York City. I didn’t have art around me, as opposed to living in Brooklyn, where you walk out the door and you see somebody that’s just walking art. I had to look for it. So two things happened at the same time: One was the release of Lauren Groff’s Florida. And the other was my discovery of your exhibition “Pitch” that was happening at MASS MoCA at the same time. And when I saw the pieces in “Pitch,” I didn’t feel seen, I felt exposed. I felt naked in the presence of it. One piece, in particular, of the person in the mask running in front of an empty church, was haunting. It felt like the wind had teeth. So one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about — just to sort of be the foundation of this conversation — can you talk to me about that church? Can you talk to me about your experience of growing up in the church, as I understand you did? And how that affected your art, how it ordered it in any sort of way? And what it does now, for you?
Allison Janae Hamilton: I grew up in the Baptist Church. So I think for many creatives of all fields, no matter what their religion or spirituality is later, it’s a foundational informant and influence — the music, the rhythm, all of that plays in. That particular image — so I was actually scouting a location for another shoot that I was planning to do later that week, and on the way, we came across this abandoned church, off Bainbridge Road. We live right on the other side of the Georgia border, so we’re kind of shooting around Florida, Georgia, around the line. And the churchyard was covered in snake skins.
I intended to shoot with my mom, my grandma, and my godmother, and my grandma and my godmother backed out. ... My mom was the only one that was still willing to do it because I was only just starting to incorporate my family and work and so they weren’t used to it yet. So I was like, I’ll just do it. So we came back to the church, I went through my mom’s closet [and] got a whole bunch of stuff and put it on. So that’s me in character.
Some artists make performative works, and that’s what they set out to do. But I never really set out to do it, it just happened, circumstantially, because I felt like I needed more characters until I came across this church. So I thought, OK, I will perform in front of this church. I’m actually kind of shy. So it wasn’t really in my nature to do it, but when you’re a photographer at heart, you will do what you need to do for your shot.
And the church definitely is still an influence. I have expanded my religious views, but that ritual and spiritual background is still an influence in my life. Especially the parts of the Black church which come from our traditional religions and all these things that I would hear my grandma, my aunts speak about or do that is not necessarily straight Christianity. So I’m always looking toward that ritual, especially as it connects to the land.
Brecencia and Pheasant II, 2015
AE: Can you talk a little bit about the use of the mask? That image of you running across in flight, that’s how I saw it, in flight in front of this abandoned church with the tambourines — that would have been enough for me to feel some type of way. But the masking, can you talk a little bit about that?
AJH:In that series, I really consider the figures and those images, photos, and the videos to be kind of custodians of the landscape. So I put the mask on because, one, I didn’t want it to read as me the artist, I wanted to read as a character. And two, the mask is kind of like that Venetian Carnival mask. So I’m also bringing in the history of Carnival in the Black diaspora sense. And in a world history sense, where Carnival becomes this moment where normal social order is disrupted or upended or turned on its head. It is a kind of burst of exuberance and sometimes excess and blasphemy that comes part and parcel with the history of Carnival.
Sometimes we used wolf masks and bird masks, sometimes it’s to obscure the human actor, or sometimes it’s to pull in another element. The recent series that I did this year, I just did little sunglasses instead of masks because I wanted people to see more of their faces. It was important to me because I was using this kind of middle-aged Black woman and I wanted you to see the human character in it. So it just depends on what I’m going for.
AE: I guess the reason why I felt exposed in it, is because I know what it’s like to have to mask something in church. And that’s why I felt a little convicted by it and a little exposed by that, because of a couple different reasons. … One of them is being queer and having to mask that for so long because I didn’t want to be blasphemous, let down my family, and be put out (laughs). So this character, being in flight from this abandoned place, and wearing this mask, it was just hitting me on all of those levels.
AJH: That’s really beautiful. There’s so many different kinds of layers that I put into the work. And some of that is, when you grew up in the church, you grew up with this sense that there’s good and there’s evil. I had a professor when I was in art school that asked, “Let’s talk about your influences outside of art. Let’s just talk about anything other than visual art that influences you.” So I started thinking of all the things that I’d bring in. And at the time, I was so into “Game of Thrones.” And I’m trying to understand, “Why do I like this show so much?” I think part of it is, none of the characters were good or bad. They were all everything — no clear-cut villain, there was no clear-cut hero, everyone had a little bit of both. I noticed that I’m drawn to media, art, and pop culture that is like that. And so that’s kind of a link for me because I think I embed my characters with a lot. There’s a sense of spirituality, irreverence, desperation, and triumph. There’s steadfastness, and sometimes they are very powerful in posture. And at other times, they’re quite vulnerable.
The second photographic image that I did — well, it was a film that I did — for “FLORIDALAND,” where I was playing a character riding on this white horse. And so the character reads as powerful, but there’s also these moments of vulnerability, as well. And another photographic series where I was in a swamp and I did the photographs with me in the water. And so there’s a strength in the posture, but there’s also a vulnerability. You’re very aware of the environment, and you’re not sure if the character is in danger, or if they are the villain. So there’s a little bit of everything.
When the wind has teeth, 2015
AE: Do you think that your work is a departure or return to that Black church experience, that worship experience as a kid?
AJH: It’s both. My mom’s side of the family is all farmers, and so we would always go up to the farm to help with planting and harvest. And I think there’s just a cyclical thing about homecoming. So that ritual and continually returning back and the cyclical kind of agrarian culture that I was raised with, I’m always coming back and coming back and coming back. I mean, I’m a snowbird. I live in New York City, but I’m home in the wintertime. And I just think constantly returning allows me to kind of put on an observational hat when I’m away, and then immerse myself back in when I’m home. It’s always going to be part of me. I make art in a way that kind of touches on what I know, what I’ve seen, and what I’ve experienced. So that’s always going to be a part of it. The tambourines are a motif in the work, they repeat, whether it’s in photographs, videos, or sculpturally. So there are definitely spiritual elements. And I think it’s still connected with the landscape, which is kind of at the forefront of the work as well.
AE: You said something about how your grandmother lived in a place — did she pass away?
AJH: No, she’s 91.
AE: Come on now! (Snaps fingers)
AJH: She’s still gardening and still the same. So she knows the family history, she knows everything. She remembers everything. Her great-grandma delivered her sibling set. Her great-grandma was basically the midwife for her mom. Her great-grandma was enslaved in Tennessee, and I recently found the slave schedules that have her name on it. So my grandma holds a lot of generational memories. It’s interesting being able to talk to somebody who knew somebody in my family who was enslaved and who was the midwife for her sibling group.
AE: One of the things you said was that your grandmother — I think it’s your grandmother — she lived or still lives where you have to burn your own garbage.
AJH: Oh yeah, it was one of my chores growing up when I would come on the farm. I would go and help drag out the garbage to burn it. They recently just got certain things. It’s just a different way of living, they have their own well. There was something that happened that was kind of like more infrastructure. I can't remember what it was, if it was mail or something. But my grandma was all up in arms because she almost didn't want the change. But yeah, they would burn trash, and food scraps went to the dogs, and cans went down the hill.
AE: Yeah, that was my childhood. We got modernized, maybe like 15, 20 years ago. I had to take the trash to the trash pile and, you know, risk death every time (laughs). And it was all a dance — you would put the trash in and you set it on fire, you had to get away real quick, so we won’t die.
So the trash pile was here and there was a persimmon tree right next to the trash pile. And there was a pear tree right up the road. And I had to pass by a plum tree on my way to the trash. So it was trash among all this beauty. And one thing that you said was “My grandmother still to this day asks me, When am I coming home?”
AJH: Yeah, that’s what she always says. I mean, I was born in Kentucky. I was raised in Florida. Where I was raised, it’s where my dad’s job took us. But culturally, my family is Tennessee on my mom’s side. And Carolina is on my dad’s side. And Tennessee was always known, in the psyche, as home. And so even though I didn’t live there 365, I still consider myself Tennessean. Everyone in my family talks with a Tennessee-specific twang. When I go to their church, when I’m home, the music is more Tennessee. It’s got more of that — do you know Valerie June’s music?
AE: Yes, I do.
AJH: She’s from the county next to my county. And her music and her voice just is so Tennessee to me. That Western flatlands style. Yeah, so when I talk to my grandmother, “When are you coming home?”
AE: Yeah, I still live in Mississippi. But when I’ve had to go to college or be away for school, or wherever the path had to take me, that was a question, constantly from my sister or my mother. “When are you coming home?” I thought about this idea of, “When are you coming home?” Does that have an implication to you that goes beyond a grandmother’s wish to see her grandchild?
AJH: Yeah, it is more than that. I think it’s a cultural thing. I think it’s more than just wanting to see us, because she comes to northern Florida to hang out with us during different holidays — so it’s not that we don’t see her — it’s the Tennessee land that is important. It’s the land. That’s why it’s at the forefront of my work, because, to me, the land is just as much part of me culturally as music, food, religion, and all these other parts of culture are. The landscape and the farm, I think she just wants us to have that as a touchstone. The culture, the history, and the meaning of that place is important to her.
AE: You and I both live in places that (laughs) pretty much constantly are mocked and maligned. And, in my case, ignored. And the question comes for me, and I’m sure for you, “Why do you stay?” And I want to bring this back to Lauren Groff, author of Florida and other fictional works. Did you ever read Florida?
AJH: I read it when I was home. When it came out, I bought it immediately. But I saved it to read [in Florida]. I live in New York City during the warm months, and I come home in the winter. So that’s my weather strategy.
So I’m reading the book, and I’m surrounded by the dripping moss, the Spanish moss, and listening to the crickets and all that. So it was really nice to read it being in the environment. What I liked about the book was that the landscape became not only a metaphor, but also this arbiter of the political and social consciousness that is happening, in a contemporary sense, in Florida, as well as linking it throughout the past.
And that’s something that I try to do in my work is allow the landscape to be a main character, rather than this backdrop that we are living on. And so when you bring it to the forefront, I think a whole world of new information can open up. And a lot of my work leans into the climate change, environmental impact conversations. And it’s always, “What can we do to get [people in the South] to understand that climate change is important, or sustainability is important?” And I come from a culture where the women in my family are hunters and fisherwomen and using the whole animal. ... There are things that the coasts — New York, California, the more blue areas of the country — can learn from the South in terms of using the full spectrum of a certain resource. And all of these things are baked into our culture. So much a part of my Black experience is nature. And so I like to present something that people are not used to seeing. I think when people think Florida, they think Disneyworld, they think South Beach, but they don’t really know the part of Florida that is the South. They don’t really know northern Florida, northwest Florida. They don’t know Leon County, Wakulla [County], Ocala, Wewahitchka. No one knows these little towns.
Seeing that we’re here, Black Floridians are here. Florida just had our Independence Day, and it was the same year as Juneteenth. Ours was May 20th, so it’s just, less than a month before. So this is a story of a regional Southern experience. So I’m trying to bring in, fold in, some of all those different narratives.
Three girls in sabal palm forest III, 2019
AE: The story that I thought about this morning [in Lauren Groff’s collection, Florida] is called “Eyewall.” I don’t know if you remember that one: The character was drunk, she decided to stay in her house and the hurricane [was coming] and she was being visited by all of these people, a former lover, her father and her husband, and her current insistence on staying. And I thought about this idea of insisting on staying, because there are Southern writers who decide to leave, and they write from a point, and they do their art and their art making from a point of observation, solely observation and memory.
And so one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you specifically is because you insist that place is present and a tool of your work, and you’re saying, “I have to be in the hurricane, I have to be in a storm.”
AJH: Totally. I feel like I need both, I need to step away, to think and to process and to be observational, and then I need to be there because it wouldn’t feel right on a certain level, to be talking about a place that I’m not in. I spent the whole last year at home during the pandemic. I was at home from March 2020 to March 2021. And that was the first time I’d spent an entire year at home in a long time — since I was in college. It was interesting to see the natural cycles of the landscape. And the political cycles, and all this kind of happening all at once. I know some work will come out of that, too. But yeah, I spend more and more time there. I’m trying to decide eventually if I want to switch it and be home more of the year. I love where I’m from. I want to be home.
All the Stars Appointed to Their Places, 2021
Once Again Amid the Pine Trees, 2021
AE: I get it. I moved home about 10 years ago, to be with my family. And it’s the best decision that I ever made. I know that I am a better ... whatever the heck I’m trying to do, because of it.
But I wanted to read something to you if you don’t mind. I was just like, These two women, they need to know each other.
The brook laughed and sang. When it encountered hard places in its bed, it hurled its water in sparkling dance figures up into the moonlight.
It sang louder, louder; danced faster, faster with a coquettish splash! at the vegetation on its banks.
At last, it danced boisterously into the bosom of the St. John’s, upsetting the whispering hyacinths who shivered and blushed, drunk with the delight of moon kisses.
The Mighty One turned peevishly in his bed and washed the feet of the Palmetto palms so violently that they awoke and began again the gossip they had left off when the Wind went to bed. A palm cannot speak without wind. The river had startled it also, for the winds sleep on the bosom of waters.
The palms murmured noisily of seasons and centuries, mating and birth and the transplanting of life. Nature knows nothing of death.
AJH: That’s beautiful. Yeah, that’s really powerful.
AE: I said you need to know this woman.
AJH: Wow, who is that woman?
AE: Zora Neale Hurston. It’s from one of her short stories, called “Magnolia Flower.”
AJH: Is this the one you’re reading the audiobook for?
AE: Yeah, it is, but forget that (laughs).
AJH: Maybe I need to listen to the audiobook versus reading it. I haven’t read that one yet. But Zora Neale Hurston has been so influential as well, I was reading this passage of hers. And it wasn’t part of a book, it was notes. And she was talking about her experience being at Barnard and then coming home to Florida. I was at Columbia at the time, in art school. And Barnard’s part of Columbia, so she’d even use the words going from Columbia to Florida. I was getting ready to come home to do a project. I’d always thought of her as a Florida woman and all this, but after reading that, I also thought about her connection to Harlem, being literally here. I still live in the neighborhood, so being right here and she and I being from northern and central Florida. I saw her as this traveler in the same way that I see myself. I had not read that passage before. It’s beautiful. It reminds me of the Wacissa River. Because we have the palmetto palms that are at these odd angles when they’re on the rivers in the spring, they come out and sometimes they’re almost parallel to the ground and then they come back up.
AJH: Can you send that passage to me? I haven’t come across that, it was beautiful. I would love to read it again. And again. (Laughs)
AE: I will. I feel like you and Zora are in conversation with each other. A century later and in different forms. But as someone who loves your work and as someone who loves Zora, I wanted to know how she factors in. Is it intentional? Is there a response to her, or is she just on your shoulder as an angel?
AJH: Definitely, her; and I would say, Richard Wright, a Mississippian. Yeah, I mean, I would say both of those writers, the way that they bring in the lush characteristics of the land, but they’re very political. If you read Richard Wright’s haiku, there’s so many emotions that are baked into these little lines that seem innocuous on first glance, but then you start to read them and you read more and more of them. And you start to feel — there’s terror, there’s anger, there’s sadness, there’s beauty, there’s so much that’s contained within those words. And so a lot of Southern writers — but definitely Zora, she’s always been kind of like a special ancestor. Not only for the manner of work, but also as a Floridian.
AE: Right, I just feel this idea that “nature knows nothing of death” and “a palm cannot speak without wind,” and I feel like that is what you insist on, in what you do.
AJH: Yeah, because the landscape is a witness. Those old oak trees, those live oaks that you know we have, it’s like, man, how much have they seen? Nature is a witness. And again, that’s why you need factors on equal footing to any human or animal characters in the work. The landscape, for me, needs to be just as prominent.
Untitled (Ouroboros), 2017
AE: I’ve written something, I’m going to send it to you. It’s about these lynchings that happened in contemporary Mississippi. And at the beginning of it, I’m talking about the trees in Mississippi. And I say they’re either witnesses or accomplices. And this brings me to something that you said in an interview that you did. I say this because they were accomplices against their will, of course, in hangings, in lynchings. And the reaction of some families has been to cut down those trees. And you used a term in a conversation that you had recently, I think with Joan Morgan, I think that’s where you use the term “tree killing.”
AJH: Yeah. So I was home in Tennessee a couple years ago, and … my grandma said, “Oh, I’m taking you back to our first farm.” And I was like, “What do you mean? I thought y’all were all born on our farm.” And she said, “No, we moved there later,” like when they were little. And so we went to the old farm and drove around just a little bit ways down the road. And so there were these tree stumps. And my grandma was saying that that’s where the peach trees were. And apparently, they had the best peaches in town. My family did. And it was a sense of pride. And they lost that farm, they were kind of swindled out of it. And before they left, my grandma said they killed the peach trees, because she didn’t want the other people to have it.
And so, I’ll take an idea like that, and I’ll make a body of work or sculpture or something around that emotional aspect, because the peaches make you think of sweetness and summer and luxury and pleasure and all these things. And then you kill this tree, because you’re forced off of your land. My aunt Sammie was a young teenager at the time — probably 12 or 13. So to think about that act. And I think that ties in with sorrow, and all these different types of engagements with nature, because nature is also refuge….And it’s also this accomplice, an unwilling accomplice, it’s a source of sustenance, it’s a source of medicine. It’s a source of traumatic labor and violence. It’s a container for all of these things. So I try to put all that into the work as much as I can.
AE: And I’m grateful to you for that. I’ve lived it, but to see it in an interpretive form sort of validates my life as a child and thinking these trees were alive. All of these things around me, the imagination of a kid. …
AJH: When I read the prologue to your Fannie Lou Hamer screenplay, there’s a sense of temporal collapsing. You’d say something like, “It could have been 2020 or it could have been 1964 or it could have been … ” and I think that is part of what it’s like to experience that Southern landscape. You see, you’re driving around now today, and you see this tree or you see this thing and then a couple towns over from us, they still close the banks down on Wednesday afternoons, from noon to 1 or something like that. Because that’s when lynchings used to take place. And that’s when everyone used to go and watch the lynchings. And it still is just part of the ritual of daily life in a contemporary fashion. So when you’re there in the South, and when I go home to Tennessee, if I’m there around Thanksgiving, … everything is covered in cotton. It’s like snow on the ground, it gets in the car, when you open the car door, it gets on your socks, it gets stuck into your hair, because it’s cotton harvest season time. There’s just cotton, in the air, like how pollen is in the spring. That’s how it is. It’s just ubiquitous everywhere. It’s like a collapsing of time. And so I noticed that that was part of your prologue, and I wonder if part of that comes from being a Southerner and being used to having history in your face all the time as you’re living there in the now.
AE: Yeah. Because there’s so many things that we live with, I live with, but even just the things that you described, when I drive to northern Mississippi, and cotton gets in your car. And these are things that in the rest of the world, they think that’s part of the past. And then you go home, and it is not the past at all.
Fencing mask with flowers, 2019
Guinea Mask, 2019
AE: So, OK. I believe that Black folks don’t have a homeland, that we were a nation that was built on and built in water in the ocean. And in some of your work, you are saying that we think about Black folks and water in terms of these oceanic ideas, because of the Middle Passage. And that’s right. That’s correct. That’s as it should be, because I believe that’s where we were birthed. Right? But you’ve said it is important to talk about these slow-moving bodies of water — rivers, the lakes.
And so this morning, I was thinking about, OK, where did the rivers meet the lakes? Where the river meets the ocean, and the Mississippi River meets the Gulf, the place where we are from. So I think about rivers a lot. And one of the things I think about is Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, when they were looking for them, they were looking for them in these rivers in Mississippi. And they did not find them in rivers, but they found them in the ground. But while they were looking for them, they were always finding bodies. And one of them — that I know of — they never found out who this kid was. I’ve been in discussion about this with my friend Imani Wilson, who’s writing this book called Deep. And it’s about this life, right? It’s about culture, but it’s also about this life that is at the bottom of a river, that is at the bottom of the ocean, that is right at the mouth of the river, that literally we form the sediment at the bottom of these places. And what I think is so interesting about what you do, is that you sort of have to imagine, what if they came out of the ocean, what they would look like? [Visual artist] Wangechi Mutu is doing some stuff with this; she has this piece called “Mama Ray.” I love this idea. And when I think about your mythology, this is what I think about. So I just want to hear you talk about that. Can you talk about the mouth of the river?
AJH: Totally. A lot of people associate — when we talk about Black American experience on water — the Atlantic, right? I’ve had people look at my work and they go straight toward the Middle Passage and the Atlantic. And I’m like, “Well, I’m really thinking about the rivers.” “Wacissa,” a piece that I did, was initially a single-channel, immersive video piece. And then recently, we did an experiment on 73 screens in Times Square.
AE: Bravo, by the way.
Floridawater I, 2019
AJH: Thank you. … “Wacissa” has so much in it. But if you’re just looking at it, you’re feeling like you’re drowning in this river experience. But what I really wanted to show in that piece was how connected and how intertwined the conversation around the environment is with conversations on race. In that image, you have trees that have fallen into the water, but they’re at the top of the screen, because the video is upside down, you’re swirling around. We had just had Hurricane Michael, that was super-late into the season and kind of rare to have such a powerful storm that late. I’m always thinking about the history of hurricanes and how as climate changes, seasons get a bit longer, storms are getting stronger, and more frequent. What does that mean for the people who are marginalized within that landscape and have always been part of this landscape? But also within the Wacissa, it’s bisected by the slave canal, which was dug up by slave labor to bring cotton from Georgia.
I’m from the Big Bend of Florida … so the slave canal was meant to cut through there to bring cotton to the ships waiting on the Gulf of Mexico. But it was never used by the time they finished it; the railroad came, and all that. But there’s an intense history right there, and your slow-moving waters coming from a region of bayous and swamps and these rivers and blackwater and flatwoods lakes. And I’m interested in that history as well. Where the water is ritualistic, baptisms, and horrific with hurricanes and life-giving, the top of the springs is also known as the headsprings. So we have the mouth of the river, the headsprings, and all these body metaphors as well. So water is a huge part of the work. But yeah, I’m kind of slowing down and thinking about labor and kind of lived experience within this landscape that is so water driven and water bound.
AE: I spent a lot of time last year in California because I had a job there, and I was stuck there because of the pandemic. And I stayed there because I was afraid to travel home. But then when I ultimately did go home in August, every other day, it was a hurricane.
AJH: I was home at the same time. And we had so many tornadoes. I mean, I have a little house across the street from my parents. One day I had run across to them because they have a basement and I don’t, so I had to pick up my dog and run across the street. Because you know the sky turns green. And so growing up in Florida, it was rare to have a category 4 or 5, and now I just feel like we’re getting stronger and stronger every year. So what does that mean for those who are most vulnerable within the environment? How does that play into response measures? That’s why I did the piece at Storm King Art Center in memoriam to the people who perished in the Okeechobee Hurricane, which was the backdrop for Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and also the Great Miami Hurricane. But I was linking that to Katrina, to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, to Sea Islands Hurricane, Galveston Hurricane, Hurricane Andrew. Like turning the light switch on all the social disasters and inequities that are embedded within this landscape. Whether that’s how people are responded to or not responded to after, why are they on the wrong side of the levee in the first place? How did that land get reorganized after the antebellum period? Why are Black folks always in the most precarious part of the landscape that’s most vulnerable to these storms? So really kind of digging deep into this history of a natural occurrence in the way that it really shows the human-made disasters that are part of our culture.
The peo-ple cried mer-cy in the storm, 2018. Photo by Jerry L. Thompson.
AE: The piece that you did at Storm King [Arts Center in Orange County, New York]. At first glance, I didn’t understand what it was, it just felt like these melting towers. And then when I got close, I was like, “Oh, my God, those are tambourines. Those are tambourines.” I think what you and I both are experiencing and feeling, the assault on us, literally our bodies and our families, with the water sort of reclaiming itself in the wind, I think of it as a reclaiming, I don’t know why. But anyway, constantly feeling vulnerable to that, but at the same time, and this is what you do, those tambourines are not incidental to me.
AJH: No, they’re not. I put a lot of code and layer into the work. And I have the nerdiest sticky notes and everything going on within the studio, and the viewer can take away what resonates, but there’s a lot in there, the characters have names and habits. And so maybe one day, I’ll flesh it out more. I’m actually working on a film that is more narrative than I’ve ever done before. But, you know, maybe I’ll start to spell out more things, but really, it’s embedded. And it surprises me how people are able to pick up on some things that I’m really choosing not to explicitly say. Because I see it as, this is what is going to sustain us in the storm. Our music, tapping these tambourines, is what’s insisting that we are still alive. That’s what I hear when I hear these tambourines playing.
Allison Janae Hamilton is a visual artist working in sculpture, installation, photography, and video. She was born in Kentucky, raised in Florida, and her maternal family's farm and homestead lies in the rural flatlands of western Tennessee. Hamilton's relationship with these locations forms the cornerstone of her artwork, particularly her interest in landscape. Using plant matter, layered imagery, complex sounds, and animal remains, Hamilton creates immersive spaces that consider the ways in which the American landscape contributes to our ideas of "Americana" and social relationships to space in the face of a changing climate, particularly within the rural American South. Headshot photo by: Frankie Alduino.
All images are courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York & Aspen. © Allison Janae Hamilton. Header photo: The Hours, 2015
