Heather Hart
Heather Hart makes installations and drawings that explore liminal spaces as a site to gather, and to challenge dominant narratives.
In much of her installation work, Hart builds life-size rooftops and porches that serve as spaces for people to come together and host events. Installed both indoors and outdoors, Hart’s rooftops and porches are thresholds—spaces between sky and land, between inside and out, that offer the possibility of another place, a site for claiming of power and space. Hart invites collaborators and the public to activate and inhabit her installations through public programming: dance, music, community conversation, workshops, activities, and storytelling. In this way, Hart builds experiences that shift visitors’ perspectives, in a mode similar to that of the trickster, a figure she was inspired to research through her family’s legacy. Across her work, Hart is interested in representations of Black culture in othered spaces, the concepts of Black persona, the Black fantastic, and agency and authorship.
Brooklyn, NY
Born 1975, Seattle, WA
2008 MFA Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
1998 BFA Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, WA