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PATRICK EARL HAMMIE (b. New Haven, Connecticut, 1981) is an artist best known for his monumental portraits related primarily to themes of identity, history, and narrative. Considering the potential paintings of the human figure have to reflect the values of the period in which they are produced, Hammie’s work investigates the expectations built into this canonical genre, probing and dismantling the idealizing impulses that have historically shaped it. Drawing on the emotive qualities of Romanticist painting and its use of heroic proportions to engage with political and humanistic expression, he focuses specifically on constructions of gender and race, putting pressure on these categories as a means of expanding understandings of identity, and reconfiguring inherited conceptions of ideal beauty and heroic nudity. Hammie received his B.A. from Coker College and his M.F.A. in painting from the University of Connecticut. He is currently an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he lives and works. In 2008, he received an Alice C. Cole ’42 fellowship from Wellesley College, where he was in residence for one year and completed his project Equivalent Exchange. In 2011, he was an artist in residence at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center with support from Alliance of Artists Communities with the Joyce Foundation. He has exhibited throughout the U.S., and his art is on display in the permanent collections of the Kohler Company and John Michael Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin, and the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. undefined