Hilary Harkness

Born

Detroit, Michigan[1]

Nationality

American

Education

• BFA from University of California, Berkeley

• MFA in Painting from Yale [1][2]

Known for

history-based revisionist paintings

Style

meticulously rendered reimagined histories that comment on sociocultural forces with a distinctly contemporary sensibility

Website

https://www.hilaryharkness.com/

Representation

represented by Mary Boone Gallery (2003–2019)

represented by P·P·O·W Gallery (2019–present)

Biography

Harkness graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California-Berkeley, where she studied biochemistry and art, and also holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale University School of Art. A former professional violinist, she honed her unique artistic worldview while living in San Francisco and has spent the majority of her career working and living in Manhattan and Brooklyn. She is married to Ara Tucker,[3] a corporate executive and Board Member of MoMA PS1.[4]

Since the early 2000s, Harkness has been part of a circle of well-known New York painters and other luminaries including Ellen Altfest, Will Cotton, Adam Cvijanovic, Inka Essenhigh, Ryan McGinness, Steve Mumford and Cynthia Rowley who gather to draw from life. [Kino, NYMag]

World War II

Harkness’s World War II work is largely Influenced by her grandfather’s military service overseas under General Patton’s command and the resulting effect on her father’s view of masculinity. Harkness’s highly detailed cross-section and vignette oil paintings focused on World War II battleships manned by women-dominated crews. Early on, the works attracted attention from well-known art critics including Ken Johnson and Jerry Saltz. When reviewing Harkness’s first solo NYC show, Saltz said in part, “Each of the five small oil paintings on view is an episodic free-for-all, or black comedy, rendered with what must be a two-hair brush.”[5] Critics reviewing her work at this time found a wide range of influence that would carry through her later works as well including Nicole Eisenman, Paul Cadmus, Henry Darger, Hieronymus Bosch, Cranach, Paul Delvaux, Tom of Finland, George Tooker, Thomas Hart Benton, superhero comics, Popular Science magazine, women’s prison films, World War II illustration, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fine, Tim Gardner and Jim Shaw. [Ken Johnson, Jerry Saltz] Representative works from this series include: Crossing the Equator (2003) and Heavy Cruisers (2004).

Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein

In 2008, as part of her third solo show at Mary Boone Gallery, Harkness debuted her first in what would become a series of paintings featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas amongst their art collection and in their milieu. This series touched on many of the themes in the World War II paintings including women “who are carnal, industrious, cultured and often sadistic.”[6] These paintings imagine the domestic life of Gertrude and Alice in Paris against the backdrop of their famous art collection. Being at home, at war isn’t always pleasant with Harkness including not just the glamour but the ennui, betrayal and revenge on certain salon goers including Ernest Hemingway who is featured in a number of paintings. In addition to being shown in exhibitions, this work has been featured on the cover of Lynne Tillman’s Weird Fucks and international publications.[7] Representative works from this series include: Alice at Loggerheads (2009) and Blue Nude (2014).

Arabella Freeman Series

In the spring of 2018, Harkness painted a master copy of Winslow Homer’s Prisoners from the Front (1866) as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Copyist Program. While painting in the museum, Harkness revised her copy to include an African-American Union soldier who Harkness named Charles Freeman. To reinforce the humanity and fullness of the African-American experience beyond slavery, Harkness created a world centered on Charles’ family. While they are free, they still have to constantly negotiate their standing in society as laws constraining their freedom continue to crop up in the Antebellum South and through the Civil War. The series features Charles, General Francis Channing Barlow and other members of the fictional landowning free black family in Virginia. Central to the series is Arabella Freeman, who Harkness imagines would have been the one to commission the Homer painting. As part of the 2019 Miami Art Basel Kabinett program, P·P·O·W Gallery presented the first set of paintings in this series. This work has been featured in Le Quotidien de L’Art (Dec 2019) and on the cover of WOHN!DESIGN (4|2021 July/August).[8] Representative works from this series include: Prisoners from the Front (1866), Commissioned by Arabella Freeman (2019), Arabella and the General (2020).

US Issue

In 2020, as a global pandemic raged and racial unrest boiled over in the United States, Harkness embarked on a series of paintings on postage stamps from the Jim Crow era. Of the work, Harkness remarked: “Whenever I hear about ‘the good old days,’ it makes me want to redirect the flames of racism and discrimination that are ravaging black communities today. I want to burn that fucking privileged nostalgic amnesia down to the ground. These Jim Crow Era stamps commemorate Andrew Jackson’s plantation home ‘The Hermitage’ where he enslaved 300 people. To me, it’s a symbolic missing link between the wrongs of the past and the present. It felt only right to paint in the flames and smoke that I’ve been seeing ever since I bought them.”[9]

Landscape Painting

Many of Harkness’s paintings are informed from life, including the landscape. In 2017, Harkness attended the Henry Clews Award Master Residency at the Chateau de la Napoule along with Will Cotton, Ivy Haldeman, David Humphrey and Anastasiya Tarasenko. [10]

Hilary Harkness's work has been exhibited worldwide, including the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain, the Deste Foundation, Athens, Greece, and is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum. She has been featured in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Interview magazine, and Esquire, among other publications.

Harkness was represented by Mary Boone Gallery in New York City from 2003 until the gallery closed in 2019. She is currently represented by P·P·O·W Gallery in New York City.

2017 Henry Clews Award Master Residency Program, La Napoule Art Foundation 2009 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters 2003 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award [11] 2002 Metcalf Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters

In 2014, Harkness co-curated Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors at FLAG Art Foundation.

Harkness was Artist in Residence at Yale Summer School of Art and Music in 2006. She has lectured widely at leading institutions such as Columbia University, Boston University, Yale University, Brandeis University, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.