Allison Janae Hamilton

The Hours.,  2015
Archival pigment print (Ed of 7 + 3AP)
24 x 36 inches
Courtesy of the artist
Value: $5,400

Part of Allison Janae Hamilton’s powerful exhibition Pitch, on view through January 2019, The Hours. (2015) transports viewers to an imagined terrain, evoking the southern landscape of Hamilton’s native northern Florida.  A vivd storyteller, Hamilton blends personal experience, epic mythologies, and family folklore to portray a place that is both magical and menacing — where Spanish moss hangs from knotted trees, alligators lurk in shallow waters, and ghosts haunt the tall pine forests. In The Hours. (2015) a haint (or spirit) in the form of a young girl in a bright yellow dress and green hair ribbons sits on the front stoop of a house, two suitcases packed. On her head, she wears the skull and antlers of a stag-like a mask. In this rich, haunting tableaux, Hamilton emphasizes how the land shapes personal identity and our shared social and political histories — in this case, encompassing themes from slavery to ecological disruption.

About the Artist
Allison Janae Hamilton was born in Kentucky and raised in Florida with jaunts to her maternal family’s farm and homestead in the rural flatlands of western Tennessee. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies at New York University, her MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University, and was a 2013-2014 Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program. Hamilton has exhibited at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Jewish Museum, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Fundación Botín, Santander, Spain; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.  Hamilton is currently an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum. She lives and works in New York City.