Patrick Earl Hammie

Patrick Earl Hammie is a painter best known for his monumental portraits that adopt body language and narrative to reinvent and remix ideal beauty and heroic nudity. His work explores the tension between power and vulnerability and examines how male artists have historically represented themselves and the nude. 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 race. Hammie characterizes his work as “an effort to reconcile inner duality, transcend typical masculine ideals and yield to new realities that require constant compromise and change.”

Since 2007 Hammie has been featured in 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. In 2010 he received the Tanne Foundation Award for excellence in the visual arts. Hammie maintains an active schedule of exhibitions and speaking engagements nationwide. He currently serves as assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.