Patrick Earl Hammie

Champaign, Illinois

Patrick Earl Hammie is an American visual artist—painter, draftsman, sculptor, and illustrator—and educator who specializes in portraiture, cultural identity, storytelling, and the body in visual culture. Hammie’s projects, interdisciplinary collaborations, and commissions filter his personal journey through the spaces, relationships, and expectations that his Black body navigates, to articulate the institutional, economic, and cultural migration of a collective Black body.

The works included are from Birth Throes, a project where Hammie asked himself, “Who carries our family’s stories and where are they culturally remembered?” They examine Black familyhood’s capacity to traverse tragedy, longing and joy, and add to culture. The works are informed by Hammie's birth and lineage, using delivery, death, and prophecy to personalize intergenerational acts of survival, innovation, rebellion, and hope. After Breonna Taylor’s and George Floyd’s deaths, and being isolated inside during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hammie completed the most recent work, Self Portrait 1981, as a way to remember that he is valuable, with a past and present, and continues to fight for a future.