“She Cuts Through Worlds”: Artist Talk by Heather Hart

Interdisciplinary artist Heather Hart delivers the opening lecture for the symposium Women Shaping Space: Feminism and Materiality

Heather Hart speaks during at WCMA on October 6, 2022. Photo: Bradley Wakoff

Watch the program video:

I’m interested in how we inhabit the world.  

I’m interested in how we take up space. Audacity. How we feel entitled to it. How that space affects us, effects our navigation, and the way we move through our lives, and how it influences our identity, our sense of self, our interactions with others, or vision of our future. Who is the author of these spaces, might the author change?  What is my territory? What is yours? Do they overlap? 

What parts of a space hold the power of that site? If it was fragmented would it still hold that same power? If it were to be re-contextualized would it be legible? If it were fragmented in a different way, would the same aura come through?Heather Hart

Join us Thursday, October 6, at 5:30 p.m. at the museum, for a talk by interdisciplinary artist Heather Hart titled “She Cuts Through Worlds.” Hart’s talk serves as the opening keynote for the symposium Women Shaping Space: Feminism and Materiality, which takes place on Friday, October 7, from 10:00 a.m.–4 p.m., at the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance on the Williams College campus. Organized in conjunction with the exhibition Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone, the symposium talks and discussions look outward from the work of pioneering artist Mary Ann Unger (1945–1998) to the contemporary landscape of curators and femme artists working at the intersections of large-scale sculpture, public art, material experimentation, and feminist practice.

A reception follows the keynote. Galleries will remain open until 8 p.m.

About the artist:
Heather Hart, based in Brooklyn, is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the power in thresholds, questioning dominant narratives, and creating alternatives to them. She was awarded grants from Anonymous Was A Woman, the Graham Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation, NYFA, and Harpo Foundation. Hart co-founded Black Lunch Table in 2005 and has won a Creative Capital award, Wikimedia Foundation grants, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant and an Andy Warhol Foundation of Art grant with that project. Her work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, Storm King Art Center, The Kohler Art Center, NCMA, Eastern Illinois University, Seattle Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and University of Toronto, Scarborough among others. Hart is an Assistant Professor at Mason Gross School for Art + Design, a member of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, an external advisor for AUC Art Collective, and a trustee at Storm King Art Center. She works with Davidson Gallery in New York and studied at Skowhegan, Whitney ISP, Cornish College of the Arts, Princeton University and received her MFA from Rutgers University. Hart was a 2021–2022 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

October 6, 2022
5:30 PM

WCMA

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