(1991) The Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial (1991) Cineprobe, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (1991) The Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial (1989) Endangered and Optic Nerve (1988) The John D. Phelan Award in Film (1988) Place Mattes, First Prize Animation, Marin Country Film Festival (1988) No No Nooky T.V., Second Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival (1987) First Prize, Humboldt Film Festival (1987) Optic Nerve, First Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival (1986) First Prize, Onion City Film Festival (1986) Optic Nerve, Cineprobe, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (1985) The Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial (1985) Style and reception Hammer was an avant-garde filmmaker and focused a large sum of her films on feminist or lesbian topics. Through the use of experimental cinema, Hammer exposed her audiences to feminist theory. Her films, she said, are meant to promote "independence and freedom from social restriction." Her films were regarded as being controversial because they focused on taboo, feminine topics such as menstruation, the female orgasm, and lesbianism. Hammer experimented with different film gauges in the 1980s, especially with 16mm film, in order to show just how fragile film itself is. One of her most well-known films, Nitrate Kisses, "explores three deviant sexualities – S/M lesbianism, mixed-race gay male lovemaking, and the passions and sexual practices of older lesbians." Hammer's film Dyketactics (1974) illustrates the importance of the female body to her work, and is shot in two sequences: the first sequence depicts a group of nude women gathering in the countryside to dance, bathe, touch one another, and interact with the environment; in the second sequence, Hammer herself is filmed sharing an intimate moment with another woman within a Bay Area house. Between the two sequences, Hammer aimed to create an erotic film that used different film language than the mainstream, heterosexual erotic films of the time. She called it a "lesbian commercial". Hammer's early films utilized natural imagery, such as trees and fruit, associating them with the female body. Nitrate Kisses (1992), her longest film to date upon its completion, functions as a commentary on how members of the LGBT community are often left out of history; it simultaneously works to remedy the problem by offering some of this lost history to its viewers. This style of filmmaking was met with mixed reactions. In a review of Hammer's films Women I Love (1976) and Double Strength (1978), critic Andrea