Patrick Hammie

Patrick Earl Hammie is an interdisciplinary visual artist and educator who specializes in portraiture, storytelling, and the body in visual culture. He examines personal and shared Black experiences, systems of knowledge production, and the politics of representation. His practice includes oil painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, illustration, and curation. He engages these topics through representation, abstraction, pastiche, and narrative, using techniques informed by critical theory and postcolonialism. As a Blerd (a Black nerd), he draws upon history, mythologies, music, and speculative fiction.

Hammie instructs students working in various media including painting, illustration, fashion, photography, sculpture, video, and performance art at all levels and from various cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. As an instructor, his primary goals are to cultivate students’ conceptual and technical abilities to interpret and create images and express ideas. At beginning levels when students have broad interests in courses of study, he introduces traditional methodologies, materials, and principles in art making. In advanced and graduate courses, he advises students in independent research and through seminars to help them go beyond familiar decisions by presenting philosophies, popular culture, technologies, and histories that they are not aware of.

Hammie's works are in the collections of the David C. Driskell Center, John Michael Kohler Art Center, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, Kinsey Institute Collections, Kohler Company Collection, Lawrence University, Purdue University, University of Illinois, and William Benton Museum of Art. He has exhibited in Germany, India, South Africa, and the United States, at venues that include California African American Museum, The Drawing Center, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Madlozi Art Gallery, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Bo Bartlett Center, and the Zhou B. Art Center. He is the inaugural recipient of the Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellowship from Wellesley College, and was an artist-in-residence at the John Michael Kohler Art Center. He has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Midwestern Voices and Visions, Puffin Foundation, Tanne Foundation, the states of Illinois and Connecticut, and other private foundations.