TANYA HARTMAN
Gallery
Installation of “We Write Ourselves Anew”
Tanya Hartman works in series that often take years to unfold. Series, such as “Prayer Paddles” or “What Was Beautiful”, parallel and bump up against each other as they wind their way into existence embodying the challenges we all share, the hope, happiness and grief. Some of the works in her exhibition We Write Ourselves Anew are inspired by her in-depth interviews with a South Sudanese Lost Boy, Lual Deng Akoon, now a man and American citizen. Other works are inspired by everyday challenges and introspection, such as the illness of a friend or sorrow of divorce.
Hartman surrounds and embraces the viewer in an evocative and intensely hand-made, elegantly awkward, meticulously stitched, glued, embroidered, written and painted environment that is complex and layered with meaning held together by powerful and poetic stories. To fully experience the richness of Tanya Hartman’s paintings requires slow looking. It is a looking and a making not defined by the duration of minutes or hours of time but rather of a lifetime, that unfolds each day, the new built on the shoulders of the past.
Tanya Hartman is a recipient of numerous grants and awards including a 2012 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Rocket Grant. Hartman was the 2012 Archie Bray Foundation Critic at the Jentel Foundation and recipient of a Hall Center Creative Work Fellowship. In addition to Hartman’s paintings, she is a gifted writer and art critic. She has published numerous art reviews and articles in Ceramics Art and Perception Magazine among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of Emprise Bank, Wichita, Kansas and Barkley Ad Agency, Kansas City, MO.
Tanya Hartman received a Fulbright Research Fellowship for Post-graduate studies in painting at the Stockholm School of Art and holds and MFA from Yale University School of Art and BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Kansas.