Artist Robin Dorland Hammer (November 25, 1946 – January 23, 2020) was born in Roanoke, Virginia, the son of Walter Dorland Hammer and Lois Miriam Allen Hammer. As part of a military family, he spent much of his childhood moving frequently, living in Germany and six U.S. states. After earning a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Memphis School for the Arts in 1968, he moved to Charleston. He received a fellowship to the prestigious Provincetown Workshop in Massachusetts in 1971. Etchings and prints he created from this period are now in the permanent collections of the Clay Center for the Arts & Sciences and the West Virginia State Museum at the Culture Center in Charleston.

After returning to Charleston, Hammer became active in a variety of arts organizations, such as Allied Artists of West Virginia. He helped found and lead the West Virginia International Film Festival and the Professional Artist Cooperative Trust, which operated a gallery on Charleston’s Capitol Street. In addition to his artistic work, he held positions at West Virginia State College (now University) and the state Division of Rehabilitation Services, retiring in 2009.

In 1991, he began a creative partnership with artist Chris Dutch that lasted nearly three decades. Working under the name DutchHammer, the pair produced mixed-media artwork exhibited at venues such as Sunrise Museum, the Clay Center for the Arts & Sciences, Tamarack, and Parkersburg Art Center. Their work garnered numerous honors, including merit awards in the West Virginia Juried Exhibition in 1997 and 2001 and a Governor’s Award at the same exhibition in 1995. Both artists also received Master Artist Fellowship Awards from the Tamarack Foundation for the Arts. Throughout this period, Hammer continued producing his own original artwork, particularly drawings and mixed-media paintings.

Beginning in 2000, Hammer expanded his work to include film and digital macro photography. Using layered images of flowers and found-object constructions, he explored themes drawn from nature and the life cycles of plants. His photography received an award at the West Virginia Guild Show in Wheeling in 2002, and his work was featured in a 2003 exhibit at the Culture Center and at the Annex Gallery in Charleston. Reflecting on this aspect of his work, Hammer said, “I have always been interested in flowers of all kinds. They have continued to inspire all my work in one way or another. I have come back to photography as a medium for expressing some of the wonder I see in the life cycle of a blossom.”

For nearly the last 25 years of his life, he was married to author and education researcher Patricia Cahape Hammer.