Entrepreneurship Lecture Series — Barbara Hammer

When I attended Barbara Hammer’s artist lecture last Wednesday, I was rewarded with Hammer’s cheerful charm and charisma. I saw in her the ability to take risks to pursue her passions and saw that she was an innate entrepreneur. She began her session with a viewing of her documentary, “Welcome to This House,” featuring the life of Elizabeth Bishop, a well known and well traveled American poet. After the film, she took questions and comments from the audience.

What was really striking to me about Hammer was her tenacity and drive. She started the film stating that it was funded by the Guggenheim Award, a grant she had applied for at least ten times prior. As it turns out, the director of the awards was also a collector of poetry, and had many of Elizabeth Bishop’s books. Although it was a coincidence, she saw the opportunity and did not let it go. She jumped on the chance and created an unbiased, deeply complex film that chronically explored Elizabeth Bishop’s life and relationships, focusing especially on her sexual life.

As an advocate of LGBTQ issues, and being lesbian herself, Hammer proudly exclaimed her social agenda through the medium she knew best. By making multiple films that explore the lives of historical lesbian women, she normalizes homosexuality and brings to light the importance of women in history. Her films challenge the social constructs created by centuries of women’s absence in recorded media and act as reminder that history is made by the people who write it, or in her case, film it.

I was enlightened by Hammer’s lecture because in a small way, her goals parallel mine. As both an artist and scientist, it has always been part of goal to help the public better connect to scientific ideas and their prevalence in everyday life. Hammer’s talk encourages me to pursue this purpose despite the odds and the slim chance of success. On top of that, Hammer utilized her expertise in filmmaking to aid her social advocacy. In the same way, I can use visual arts as a gateway for science communication like many science journalists do with writing. This recognition that no pursuits are truly separate is perhaps at the heart of entrepreneurial thinking.