Artists

Candace Hill-Montgomery

Press release

Hollybush Gardens is pleased to present A Bare Woman Mutters Nothing… Candace Hill-Montgomery's first solo exhibition with the gallery, which brings together works from 1971–2026. Hill-Montgomery moves across assemblage, collage, painting, photography, textile and language to create works that combine social commentary with poetic lyricism. She developed an experimental approach in relation to her experience growing up in postwar New York City, alongside the revolutionary activism of the time. An early figurative painting Our Historic Children Sag Harbor Hills, 1971, based on the artist's visits to the African American beachfront community, depicts two figures on the dunes. One child is seated, wearing a striped blue bathing robe, with an older sibling standing over her in a long yellow dress that billows in the breeze; both look out hopefully into the distance. Two later paintings The Initial Puddle's Grown Up, 1993 and The Museum Grade Dust Wide Brushoff Expo, 2014 evidence Hill-Montgomery's fluidity between different registers of painting and drawing. The former shows tears rolling down the cheeks of a boy with a triangular nose, while the latter is a small canvas depicting a figure in profile with a hairbrush in her hair in place of an Afro pick. Her skin is formed by a wash of green and brown tones, with swirls of dust circling around. Hill-Montgomery inherited skills such as knitting, quilting and crocheting from her grandmothers, which she brings into her practice in works such as Quilt Mixing Proverbial Wisdom Without Poaching Fish In', 1999, a large patchwork textile with rainbow-coloured brushstrokes, embroidered with line drawings of figures, animals and buildings, combined with text fragments from the Book of Proverbs concerning values and moral behaviour. In 2013, Hill-Montgomery began to make weaves of various sizes on hand-made looms, which include rich combinations of materials, such as Japanese paper, raw silk, cashmere, mohair, Navajo Diné sheep's wool, leather and horsehair. The weaves collage together reflections on political history and current-day events and feature cultural icons, from well-known pop stars to artists, while simultaneously exploring abstract colour and form. The compositions are not planned in advance, but generate significance through the process of making, in addition to the work's poetic titles, which tease out their subject matter. For Hill-Montgomery, this process entails 'finding something internal that I could never know until it's done'. The weaves also incorporate found materials, such as fragments found after storms near the artist's home in Long Island; or autobiographical material, including photographs of Hill-Montgomery during her early modelling career, as one of the few Black models of the time, such as Mountain Wasteland Face Haiku, 2016–17. The weaves are often hung from or attached to objects, including a copper Katanga Cross in Concept Doubles While Shorts on Circumstance Rumbles, 2026, rusted farm equipment, or tools from her father's childhood home in Alabama. In Give Attention to Transportation a Thought, 1980–2024, a weave becomes a protective armour for a papier-mâché model of a black panther, a reference to the Black Panther Party, the political and militant organisation in the United States which advocated for civil rights through systemic change. As Amy Tobin writes, 'While Hill-Montgomery was not a member of the Party, she became increasingly aware of the erasure and distortion of their legacy and the broader civil rights movement among younger generations through subsequent decades.' A number of recent weaves, including ConFront Connection Spread'D, Jester Pesterer, and Another Running Go Round Spent Echo Hanging, 2026, incorporate cache-sexes, early twentieth-century coverings worn by girls and women of the Kirdi tribe in Cameroon on ceremonial occasions. Here, these inverted triangular iron coverings are woven into or suspended from the surface of the works, sometimes with textile counterparts. Hill-Montgomery writes, 'there is much to say about how girls are misused around the world, but all we can do is our best to offer art as beauty and solace'. The exhibition also includes a series of double exposed photographs from 1992 which are composed of two layers: one layer features images of Hill-Montgomery's own artworks, while the other includes images taken in New York. DIAL's It Up or (i Dew wanna leave here pollinated) show the city under construction, while Debí tirar más fotos de frutas cuando te tuve Iare (I should have taken more photos of fruit when I had you) feature images of fruit stands on the streets of Brooklyn, which Hill-Montgomery regularly passed while commuting to her teaching job at an alternative night school in Flatbush. 'First comes a sort of journalistic voyeurism', she notes, 'examining how huge amounts of fruit and vegetables arrive at a massive greengrocer in pre-gentrified Brooklyn, watching everyday people come to buy small amounts and wondering how this amount of produce stays fresh and where ultimately it all ends up.' These vividly coloured images capture the energy of the city as a conduit for goods, finances, and modes of labour – from the rural workers who harvested the food to the immigrant vendors selling it, and those purchasing it. The photographs create chance pairings and visual entanglements to form new and unexpected associations. As Helen Marten writes: 'Hill-Montgomery positions photography not as a transparent record of reality, but as a site where histories refuse linear narration'. A Companions booklet published to accompany the exhibition features a commissioned text by Helen Marten and a new poem by Simone White. About the Artist Candace Hill-Montgomery (b. 1945, Queens, New York; lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York). Solo exhibitions include A Bare Woman Mutters Nothing…, Hollybush Gardens, London (2026) and Pretty Birds Peer Speak Sow Peculiar, Blank Forms, New York (2024). Selected group exhibitions include Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York (2026); From the Studio: Fifty-Eight Years of Artists in Residence, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; For Liberation and For Life: The Legacy of Black Dimensions in Art, The Albany Institute of History & Art, New York; Here Is a Gale Warning: Art, Crisis & Survival, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (all 2025) and Reluctant Gravities, Hollybush Gardens, London (2024). In the 1980s, Hill-Montgomery exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the New Museum, Franklin Furnace and Fashion Moda in New York, and at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. In 1980, her work was included in the infamous Times Square Show, New York, organised by Colab and Issue, Social Strategies by Women Artists at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, curated by Lucy R. Lippard. In 1983, together with Lippard, she organised and exhibited in Working Artists/WorkingWomen/WorkingTogether at Gallery 1199, New York. In 1985, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. At this time, she also made public installations across New York City and published artist books of poetry and photography alongside texts in publications including Wedge and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Her latest publications include Abstractive, Candace Hill and David Grundy (Further Other Books Works, 2026); the collection Muss Sill (Distance No Object, 2020) and Short Leash Kept On (Materials, 2022), a long poem inspired by detective fiction and the writing of Lloyd Addison and Russell Atkins. In 2023, a major essay on her work, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Against Containment by Amy Tobin was published in Art History, Volume 46.