Heather Hart, Great Grandfather Things (2017)

Pencil drawings printed in halftone, Permaset Aqua Fabric ink on Arches 88, 28.75 in x 22 in Edition of 25, produced with Print Fellow Keely Snook Through her interdisciplinary practice Heather Hart (American, b. 1975) fuses fabricated and historical belief systems; legends that have been bequeathed through generations mixed with invention and intuition. 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. At Storm King Art Center Heather was part of the Outlooks series where she comprised an interactive sculptural environment in the form of a domestic rooftop—a space that, in collaboration with community partners, is repeatedly enlivened by music, workshops, movement, spoken word and poetry, and other events. The Oracle of Lacuna is in reference to the gaps present in official, written histories of the Hudson Valley region—gaps that individuals fill and refill with interpretations and translations originating from personal experiences, as well as fantasies. As Hart has said, “The narratives of The Oracle of Lacuna are meant to emerge and transform through public programming and viewer activation. I am interested not only in creating a site-specific liminal space for personal reclamation but also in unpacking dominant narratives and creating alternatives to them.” Visitors can walk atop and underneath the scultpure!