What We Fund
"Love is like the sea...." by Allison Janae Hamilton
2023 | New York City, NY
Materials: Bronze
This sculpture is part of The Helis Foundation Collection
About the Artist
Born in Kentucky, raised in Florida, and with family roots in rural Western Tennessee, Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984; Lexington, KY) draws on her upbringing in the American South throughout her practice, weaving themes of environmental justice, landscape, and mythology into sculpture, installation, photography, and film. In what she describes as "rural Black surrealism," Hamilton is known for monumental artworks that blend the epic with the everyday in ways that are both haunting and breathtaking. Love is like the sea...(2023) takes its title from Zora Neal Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, set against the backdrop of the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928, which devastated the state of Florida. The monumental sculpture—three columns of stacked tambourine forms cast in bronze—addresses the intersection of environmental crisis and cultural history. Hamilton's tambourine towers have, since 2014, explored these connections through the use of discarded tambourines, natural materials, and other found elements. Love is like the sea... is the first of Hamilton's tambourine towers constructed in bronze, representing a new chapter in her longstanding work with outdoor sculpture.
Hamilton has exhibited widely at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Storm King Art Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA PS1, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and others. Solo exhibitions of her work include Between Life and Landscape at the Georgia Museum of Art (2022); Pitch at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), (2018); Passage at Atlanta Contemporary, (2018); and Wonder Room at Recess (2017). Hamilton's work is in numerous public and private collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; and the Hessell Foundation Collection at Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.
