As soon as she arrived in New York in 1969, Harmony Hammond moved on from the monumental hard-edge shaped canvases that she had painted in Minneapolis in the late 1960s. She realized that following a minimalist tradition was imitative, betraying a lack of confidence: “Like the early work of many women of my age, mine was personal. But we learned to hide this aspect for fear that the work would be ignored or ridiculed.” She then involved herself in feminist causes, joining a women’s consciousness-raising group, and in the fight for civil rights; she also became involved in gay and lesbian activism and demonstrated against the Vietnam War.

In 1972, she co-founded A.I.R. (Artists in Residence, Inc.), the first cooperative art gallery run by women, and had a solo exhibition there a year later. The ideas that she was exposed to in the second wave of feminism influenced her work, giving it a political slant. In 1970, she said: “Feminism has broken the silence, has given me the intellectual and creative support which… helped me to develop work which comes from my experience as a woman.”
In 1974, three Floorpieces, textile pieces made up of strips of coloured fabric partly covered with acrylic paint, were spread out on the floor in the exhibition A Woman’s Group at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York. Partly sculpture and partly painting, between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, they are difficult to classify. Although they are in the shape of a rug, the artist gave them the status of a pictorial work by showing them grouped next to empty walls. Hammond chose a cheap material, neglected by the artists then dominating the art scene, yet full of meaning. These ‘rags’ from bundles of material thrown out by textile factories were a reference to a world that was considered the province of women, that of home decor and household tasks. Interested in the art and crafts of ancient cultures that had been excluded from mainstream art history, Hammond used the traditional weaving method of rag rug.

She also linked the Floorpieces to her practice of tai chi chuan and then aikido, which gave her a new sense of autonomy: ‘as a strong woman you are the center, reaching out to other strong women’. When making them, she sat in the middle of the work, weaving the strips of fabric around her, a process that could be seen as a metaphor for the connection between women. That working method seems to foreshadow From the Center (1976), the collection of feminist essays by Lucy R. Lippard, who saw the Floorpieces as an ironic response to Carl Andre’s metal plates.

In 1977, Hammond published “Feminist Abstract Art: A Political Viewpoint” in the magazine Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, of which she was a co-founder. She did not support the idea of specifically female art as promoted by artists such as Judy Chicago (b. 1939). Instead, she argued for the possibility of feminist abstraction with a political content.