Ann Hamilton: Still and Moving - The Tactile Image

While best known for large-scale ephemeral installations, performances, and public projects, Ann Hamilton (b. 1956) has regularly explored photography throughout her four-decade career. Over the past ten years, photography has become an increasingly important aspect of her practice, with scanning as the dominant medium in several recent projects, including her most recent photo-based series, still and moving - the tacile image. The work, featured in this volume, was created from 2021 to 2025 in response to small-scale figural sculptures in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Hamilton's images focus on the glance, the fragment, and the gesture--elements that imbue the sculptures with movement and expression--and return time to her still subjects.

A visual essay by Hamilton connects related compositions in a format recalling a filmstrip that hints at, but never supplies, a narrative. The images are interspersed with fragments of found text and scans of fabric that recall curtains drawn between acts and recall the prevalence of drapery in depictions of the human figure. The visual essay is followed by a scholarly essay by Barbara Tannenbaum that sets Hamilton's new work in the context of the artist's career-long practice of photography. It discusses the ways that, for Hamilton, the processes used and the experience of making an artwork are essential components of its meaning.

Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art

Exhibition Schedule:

Cleveland Museum of Art
(December 14, 2025-March 29, 2026)