David Hartt (b. 1967, Montréal, Canada) is an artist whose work spans photography, video, sculpture, textiles and installation. He is principally concerned with the relationship between ideology and the built environment. Hartt’s interest in the landscape encompasses architecture as a force that molds and responds to social practices, and that incubates activities that have a pronounced effect on cultural and political life. His work explores utopic visions of the landscape, attending to the interactions between hegemonic and counter-normative forces.
Thus Stray Light (2013) explores the iconic headquarters of the Johnson Publishing Company in downtown Chicago. The company’s signal publications, Ebony and Jet magazine, have had a sustained and profound impact on black and African-American life in the United States and abroad. Hartt’s Belvedere (2015) consists of a suite of photographs that describe the unpopulated interior spaces of the Mackinac Center for Publiuc Policy, located in Midland, Michigan, home to a free-market thinktank responsible for originating the concept of ‘the Overton window,’ a tactic in political strategy that aims, through targeted endorsements of extremist views, to shift the center of debate. More recently, The Histories focuses on the Americas and the Caribbean during the 19th century, exploring real and imagined landscapes informed by the work of Martin Johnson Heade, Robert S. Duncanson, Michel-Jean Cazabon and Frederic Church. Hartt’s contemporary interpretations use video, tapestry and sculpture alongside musical collaborations with Girma Yifrashewa, Van Dyke Parks and Stefan Betke to reanimate and engage black transnational imaginings and experiences of place.
Hartt has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Graham Foundation, Chicago; and LAXART, Los Angeles, among others. Recent group exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Art Gallery of Ontario, among others. Hartt is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at The Glass House, New Canaan, CT. Two new commissions are now included in Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at MoMA, New York, and New Grit: Art & Philly Now at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (opening May 7th).
Josephine Pryde (born 1967, Alnwick, UK; lives Berlin and London) is Professor of Contemporary Art and Photography at the University of the Arts, Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include These Are Just Things I Say, They Are Not My Opinions, Arnolfini, Bristol, 2014; Knickers, Berlin, Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn, Estonia, 2014; PHOTOGRAPHS YOU TAKE, THE SCHTIP, Sheffield, 2013; Therapie Thank You, MD 72, Berlin, and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, 2010; La Vie d’Artiste, Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, 2009; Valerie, Secession, Vienna, 2004; and Brains & Chains, Cubitt, London, 2004. Selected group exhibitions include Gjon Mili International Photo Exhibition 2015, National Gallery of Kosovo, Pristina; One Shots and Imagines, Downtown Photography Space, Los Angeles, 2014; and New Photography 2013: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Brendan Fowler, Annette Kelm, Lisa Oppenheim, Anna Ostoya, Josephine Pryde, Eileen Quinlan, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Emily Jacir lives in the Mediterranean and is an artist and filmmaker who is primarily concerned with transformation, questions of translation, resistance and silenced historical narratives. Her work investigates personal and collective movement through public space and its implications on the physical and social experience of transmediterranean space and time. Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative gestures, and in-depth research. Jacir is the recipient of several awards, including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); a Prince Claus Award from the Prince Claus Fund in The Hague (2007); the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum (2008); the Alpert Award (2011) from the Herb Alpert Foundation; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015). Recent solo exhibitionsinclude the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016-17); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Darat il Funun,Amman (2014-2015); Beirut Art Center (2010); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009). She has been actively involvedin education in Palestine since 2000 and deeply investedin creating alternative spaces of knowledge production internationally. She is the Founding Director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research and was recently the curator the Young Artist of the Year Award 2018 at the A. M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah “We Shall Be Monsters”.