06-11-2023 HOF - Flipbook - Page 37
Baltimore Sun Media | Sunday, June 11, 2023
D
r. Leslie King Hammond never minded
being sent to her room for timeouts as
a child, growing up in New York City.
Under her bed, stashed in a Cuban
cigar box, she had a treasure trove of
art supplies to soothe her: scissors,
pencils, a needle and thread, beads,
shells and other precious scraps.
“When my mother would say, ‘OK,
you can come out now,’ I’d say, ‘That’s
OK, I’m good,’” says King Hammond, now 78. She made doll clothes and
African masks and beaded bracelets using a loom.
That little cigar box “was a place where I could mediate my emotions,”
she says. For King Hammond, making art is how she has always made sense
of the world. It is her world.
As a young adult, King Hammond moved to Baltimore, which she has
now called home for over five decades. Her mark here is significant.At the
Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) — where she taught and served
as the dean of graduate studies and the founding director of the Center
for Race and Culture — she ushered new generations of talent into the art
world. She has curated exhibits in New York and Maryland, published
writing on other artists and received awards from organizations across
the country.
Age: 78
Hometown: New York City
Current residence: Baltimore
Education: B.F.A. from Queens College, City University of
New York; M.A., Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University
Career highlights: Historical consultant, FX’s“Kindred”;
founding director of MICA’s Center for Race and Culture;
lecturer in MICA’s art history department; dean of
graduate studies (MFA/MA programs) at MICA; project
director of the Ford Foundation-Philip Morris Fellowship
for Artists of Color at MICA; exhibits curated in New York
and Maryland; authored brochures, essays, books and
more for over 60 projects and exhibitions
Civic and charitable activities: Board member:
Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American
History and Culture, Baltimore Art Realty Corporation,
American Craft Council, Minneapolis, Walters Art
Museum, Collections Committee
Family: Married to Jose Mapily, deceased;
one son, one stepson, one grandson
Underpinning it all, she says:
an openness to all that life has to
offer.
“I allowed myself to follow
the path of where my curiosity
demanded that I needed to be,”
she says.
She read her way through the
alphabet, absorbing information
about anthropology, archaeology, biology and more. She was
particularly interested in books
documenting her own history
and identity as “a woman of African descent,” but what she found
often left her disappointed. There
were no “real books about Africa,
other than animals, a lot of animal
books,” she says. “Even as a young
person, I knew that that was part
of the exoticized mythology
around Africa.”
King Hammond’s love for
learning continued into her young
adulthood. She earned a B.F.A.
degree from Queens College, part
of the City University of New York
system, followed by a master’s
degree and Ph.D. from the Johns
Hopkins University’s art history
department.
At Johns Hopkins, King
Hammond and Lowery Stokes
Sims, who would go on to curate
New York’s Museum of Arts and
Design, acted as “older sisters” to
the university’s cohort of Black
students, Sims says. She and King
Hammond both participated in a
Girl Scouts group as children in
Queens, and their time at Queens
College overlapped, but they grew
closer at Johns Hopkins, where
Sims earned a master’s degree in
art history.
“We struck up a friendship,”
Sims says. “She always was a kind
of energetic, take-charge person.”
Acquiring knowledge wasn’t
limited to the classroom for King
Hammond; it was also done on
trips to Canada, Puerto Rico and
Barbados. “I loved the experience
of being young and dumb and
stupid, and learning from those
experiences how to navigate the
world,” she says.
At MICA, serving as the project director of the Fellowship for
Artists of Color, King Hammond
worked to “make sure the door
of opportunity is open” for a new
crop of artists, she says.
As a lecturer, her courses on
African American art in particular
were “life-changing,” according
to Susie Brandt, who has taught
in the school’s fiber department
for over 20 years.
“[African American students]
were thrilled to find out that
there was this whole world of art
history that was particular to [the]
African American community
that they knew nothing about,
and they were discovering it,”
she says.
King Hammond is “just a whirlwind,” Brandt says.
During the COVID pandemic,
the pair spent time together quilting, when MICA’s quilt group,
which raffles handmade quilts
to raise money for student scholarships and other causes, began
meeting via Zoom in 2020.
When King Hammond came
into the fold, she became the life
of the party.
“She really knows how to
bring people together. … She
understands the importance of
community,” Brandt says. “The
enthusiasm and excitement that
she generates is extraordinary.”
King Hammond’s efforts with
the quilting group would eventually make television. Working with MICA’s group and the
local guild of African American
quilters, King Hammond helped
create quilts and other props
for FX’s “Kindred,” a sci-fi show
based on Octavia Butler’s book of
the same name, in which a Black
woman travels through time
between 1970s California and an
antebellum Maryland plantation.
King Hammond turned to
drawings and written descriptions to ensure historical accuracy. Roughly 30 participants
pieced together 28 quilts entirely
by hand in only two weeks. When
they gathered to watch the show,
which aired in December, “people
were screaming every time they
saw a crack of a quilt, or a piece
of embroidery,” King Hammond
says.
Those Zoom meetings blossomed into something beautiful
for King Hammond, as so many
things do.
“My life is a journey,” she says,
“a journey into the arts.”
— Abigail Gruskin
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