Working across diverse modes – installation, assemblage, photography, painting, textiles and the written word – Candace Hill-Montgomery’s diverse practice interrogates social inequities, including themes of racism, urban gentrification, poverty and state violence, through material experimentation. Born and raised in suburban Queens, New York, her encounters with a stratified post-war New York City segregated along lines of both race and class were formative experiences that influenced much of her early work. She was introduced to artmaking through childhood lessons at Albert Pels Art School in Manhattan, where she learned the craft of traditional portraiture. She later studied at Fordham University, and subsequently gained a master’s degree through Hunter College’s art programme, where she was further introduced to the language of abstraction and conceptualism. Politicised by the Black revolutionary activism of the 1970s, C. Hill-Montgomery’s work began to interrogate systems of social inequality and violence. In 1979, while still enrolled as an undergraduate at Fordham University, she was the artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In this context, the artist was creatively catalysed by the abundance of neglected apartment buildings that had been left to decay by absentee landlords; in response, she mounted Reflections on Vacancy (1979), an unsanctioned installation in a foreclosed tenement on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, in which she draped sheets of silver Mylar in the empty window frames of the hollowed-out building; the building, recast, faced out onto a pristine white picket fence installed in a similarly abandoned lot, positing a class confrontation amidst geographic asymmetries. In 1981, her public art project “General Coldspot Memorials to Indifference in the Year of our Lord 1981” (1981) commissioned by Creative Time, erected a wall of twenty-six stranded fridge doors in disinvested public space, calling attention to burgeoning food inequities.

Throughout her career, C. Hill-Montgomery has occupied diverse creative circles of New York City. Early in her career, she was a successful runway and print model; for nearly three decades, the artist worked as an educator in the New York City school system, and she also taught for five years at the School of Visual Arts. In the early 1980s she collaborated with artists involved in the West Village’s downtown scene, as well as with artists based in Harlem and the South Bronx. C. Hill-Montgomery was a participant in the Times Square Show (1980), a guerrilla exhibition organised by the artist collective Collaborative Projects Inc. and held in a temporarily abandoned massage parlour on 42nd street. Her multipart installation 92 Morningside – Remember Fred Hampton (1980) referenced two violent events: an FBI raid in search of Black liberation militant Assata Shakur, and Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton’s assassination. C. Hill-Montgomery’s title interpolated these twinned brutalities into the site of Times Square, geographically and temporally conflating events of anti-Black state violence, racialised surveillance and real estate speculation to expose their shared foundations. In 1982, C. Hill-Montgomery organised an exhibition with feminist curator and activist Lucy Lippard titled “Working Women/Working Artists/Working Together”, which exhibited artists whose practices explored gender and wage-work, including Lorna Simpson (1960), Vanalyne Green (1948), Sandra Payne (1951–2021) and Ntozake Shange (1948–2018); the exhibition was hosted at a gallery in New York City operated by a union representing hospital workers.

Following her retirement from teaching in 2011, C. Hill-Montgomery settled in Bridgehampton, Long Island, where her practice has taken on a different scale. The artist’s 2010s-2020s works are colourful textile assemblages: intimate, irregular weavings from hand-spun wool constructed on small looms. The artist incorporates found materials, such as shoelaces or painter’s tape, to produce semi-abstract weavings that reference expansive artefacts of historical and contemporary culture. Across several decades, C. Hill-Montgomery’s work has been exhibited broadly in the State of New York, including at the Store Front Museum, Franklin Furnace, Artists Space , Fashion Moda, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum and Blank Forms. She was a 1985 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and also has published two poetry collections: Muss Sill (2020) and Short Leash Kept On (2022).