Lemon Tree

Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984; Lexington, KY) is an award-winning artist and filmmaker who draws on her upbringing in the rural American South to weave themes of landscape, folklore, and mythology within a stunning visual language. Layering plant matter, landscape and figurative imagery, complex sounds, and animal remains throughout her work, Hamilton creates immersive films that consider notions of Americana and our relationships to land in the face of a changing environment, particularly in the American south.

Hamilton was born in Kentucky and raised in Florida, and her maternal family’s farm and homestead is located in the rural flatlands of western Tennessee. Her relationship with these places forms the cornerstone of her practice—particularly her interest in landscape. In Hamilton’s treatment of land, the natural environment is the central protagonist—rather than a backdrop—in the unfolding of historic and contemporary narratives. Blending land-centered folklore and personal family narratives, she engages haunting—yet epic—mythologies that address the social and political concerns of today’s changing southern terrain, including land loss, environmental justice, climate change, and sustainability. Each work contains narratives pieced together from folktales, hunting and farming rituals, African-American nature writing, and Baptist hymns. Drawing from all of these references, she envisions what an epic myth looks and feels like in rural terrain.

Hamilton has screened her projects widely across the United States and abroad, from the Brooklyn Museum, to TANK Shanghai, to projecting a project on 73 screens in Manhattan's Times Square. Films by the artist are held in public collections such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Thoma Foundation, and the JP Morgan Art Collection. Hamilton has participated in a range of fellowships and residencies, including at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and Fundación Botín, Santander, Spain. She is the recipient of the VIA Art Fund Production Grant, Creative Capital Award and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. Hamilton holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She lives and works in New York.