Hartt’s nuanced approach to addressing identity and colonial history is evident in his way of thinking about images.
TUVALU IS SINKING. In a few decades, the island nation in the South Pacific might be mostly waves. Many of us know this from the internet, the island’s submersion a de facto symbol of climate change, much like starving polar bears stranded on floating icebergs. The artist David Hartt knows about Tuvalu because he went there in 2015 to make a film called Adrift and to witness firsthand the effects of rising sea levels. He’s traveled to swamplands in Florida and to Jamaica, where the artist Frederic Church sketched plein air studies. And he found the exact location in Ohio where the landscape painter Robert Duncanson set his easel for Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River (1851). For more than a decade, he’s made artworks—photographs, essayistic films, sculptural and sound installations— that examine place and history.
Visiting these diverse, far-flung locations isn’t about ecotourism or metaphorical trophy hunting. Hartt’s researchdriven art leads him to crossroads where colonial-inflected landscapes meet rapidly changing environmental and political conditions. He weaves together interconnecting, unsettled narratives, drawing viewers into a delicate web that only appears fragile. “One mode of working is trying to engage in dimensionalized problems that I see as being fundamentally unstable,” he told me recently.
Hartt lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. But he spent much of last fall traveling the globe, tracing these connections: an exhibition in Germany, a residency in France, new work made in South Africa. He studied art in Canada, where he was born, receiving a BFA from the University of Ottawa, followed by an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the mid-1990s. And then he drifted away from art making—in that way one does when young and trying to figure out where life might lead. He worked as an intern in the photography department at the Art Institute of Chicago, whose curators Sylvia Wolf and Madeleine Grynsztejn made a huge impact on him, before leaving the field for more commercial pursuits in design and tech. He returned to art in earnest around 2009, showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2013, and then exponentially: the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art.
For some, a gap in the CV would cast a pall over their artistic trajectory, but not for Hartt. The time away allowed for culture to catch up with his ambitious and conceptually complex vision, which often uses archival research to illuminate present-day states of marginalization or displacement. He describes himself as grappling with his curiosity around places or events entangled in conditions of globalization or the Anthropocene. “David has this terrific understanding that disparate parts of the world get connected not in straight lines but in sort of discontinuous dotted lines, or circular formations, or indirectly ricocheting and ping-ponging off other parts of the world,” Matthew S. Witkovsky, chair and curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, told me.
Hartt was raised in Toronto, an adopted, biracial child of white, Jewish parents. His birth mother is white and his birth father was from the Caribbean. “I don’t like the idea of cutting off the hyphenated nature of who I am,” said Hartt. Indeed, there is a sense that this “hyphenated nature” shaped an ability to keenly understand his own perspective within a greater context. “I was the only Black kid at a high school of almost 1,500, 2,000 people,” he added.
Hartt’s nuanced approach to addressing identity and colonial history is evident in his way of thinking about images, architecture, and landscapes. “What I find interesting about his work,” said the architecture historian Mabel O. Wilson, “is the way in which he makes you conscious that what you’re looking at is a representation—you’re not looking at the plant, you’re looking at the image of the plant. And I think Blackness is a construction. It’s a mode of representation. And that is very useful in trying to understand the kinds of modalities that are possible.”
The Histories (Le Mancenillier) captures Hartt’s hyphenated identity in the most literal form. The site-specific multimedia artwork was installed, in 2019, at Beth Sholom Synagogue in suburban Philadelphia, a structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1954. A glazed, ziggurat-shaped roof tops Beth Sholom’s main sanctuary, and, like in many of Wright’s buildings, it leaks, producing a hothouse atmosphere. Hartt placed potted Phalaenopsis orchids—the magenta-and-white variety seen in supermarkets and known as moth orchids—within the space to capture drips. “We were trying to figure out how to make these sensitive interventions that wouldn’t disrupt the day-today functioning of the synagogue but would reframe, or renegotiate, the audience’s and the congregation’s understanding of the space,” explained Cole Akers, who organized the Beth Sholom exhibition and is a curator for the Glass House, the architect Philip Johnson’s historic building and estate in New Canaan, Connecticut, that is now a museum. In 2021, Akers also invited Hartt to create A Colored Garden, a living intervention based on the still life paintings of Charles Ethan Porter, one of the only Black artists to attend the National Academy of Design.
The Histories (Le Mancenillier) interweaves tropical plants, photographic tapestries, Wright’s architecture, and video footage of Haiti and Louisiana to produce a meditation on human and nonhuman migrations. The parenthetical part of the title comes from an 1851 composition by the pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk that blends Creole and classical music; the name also refers to a type of swamp-loving tree. Hartt asked the Ethiopian pianist Girma Yifrashewa to reinterpret and record the music, which was then performed at Beth Sholom. (A recording also plays in the sanctuary.) The more one engages with Hartt’s The Histories (Le Mancenillier), the more its layers and complexities rise to the surface. Implications, too. His moth orchid tapestry—the lascivious houseplant presented sideways, devoid of background, and larger-than-life—seems to dare viewers to disconnect it from extractive global trade.
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Plants track through much of Hartt’s recent output as a kind of meditation on what we think of as natural.
Plants, often in relation to architecture, track through much of Hartt’s recent output as a kind of meditation on how what we think of as natural, such as a landscape or garden, is a human construct of sometimes visible, sometimes invisible structures. Plants also reflect a diasporic condition, specimens taken from one place, one habitat, and propagated in foreign lands. Hartt shares an old joke by the comedian Steven Wright to try to describe what he means by “garden,” the title of a trio of artworks made over the last few years. He told it with the comedian’s signature deadpan timing: “‘You know,’ he says, ‘I have the world’s largest seashell collection; I keep it scattered on beaches.’ The joke is quite literal in that the garden, as I’m describing it, is a kind of dispersed diasporic, kind of global, domain.”
The garden was the subject of Hartt’s solo exhibition Naturphilosophie, which opened at Galerie Thomas Schulte, in Berlin, last November. On view was a suite of tapestries (with imagery translated from photographs) and photogravures that correlate to the work of the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. Hartt visited several cities in Europe, including Leiden, Uppsala, and Gottingen, that are associated with Linnaeus’s contributions to the binomial nomenclature system—genus, species—for organisms. The system, designed to bring order to the natural world, can also be seen as an instrument of control and extraction of what might have been called wild.
The Garden series is a way of making sense of a lost Eden— a prelapsarian fantasy of a world where nature exists beyond the built environment. Hartt’s images purposefully border on an aesthetic he calls “cheesy sentimentality,” a phrase used to both cite the work of the German Romantic printmakers he’s inspired by and address the self-consciousness of photographic representation. In his drawing attention to a heightened reality, darker narratives come through. “One thing that my work has always dealt with is relationships between utopic realities and dystopic realities,” Hartt said. “And so, in some ways, I’m trying to assemble, for lack of a better word, a kind of utopia through this articulation of multiple landscapes.”
Connecting these geographies, The Garden series uses photographs to bridge past and present. But it would be wrong to constrain Hartt solely to photography. Like his explorations, his medium is interdisciplinary. “It’s convenient, or at least common, to say in the last quarter century or so that the artist works across media,” Witkovsky said. “He works across domains, really.” For an exhibition on Pan-Africanism slated for November 2024, Witkovsky commissioned the film Hartt’s been making in South Africa. “For David, architecture is important,” Witkovsky explained. “Film is obviously important, since he makes them, and various photographic processes like photogravure, gelatin silver, colored prints. And then tapestry is exciting to him as design, or applied arts.”
Referencing early photography in the nineteenth century, Hartt said, “I’m interested in photography as a kind of tool of analysis.” At that time, the camera was less in the service of an aesthetic practice and more a means of documentation for disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, and cartography. Those scientific fields, of course, are inextricably linked with settlement and territorial expansion. Photography, in capturing images of exotic lands and bringing them back home, is complicit in these acts of dominion.
Hartt’s working methods are exacting. When traveling he brings with him a large folder of images—photographs, paintings, prints—that prefigure his own framing. His South Africa film, titled The Garden (2024), was photographed in and outside Cape Town using a combination of time-lapse footage and bursts of still images to capture this incredibly biodiverse region. “It’s an attempt for me to demonstrate ‘plant-time,’” Hartt said in an email, sharing a link to an early cut of the film. In it, there is an overwhelming sense of motion and stillness, followed by isolation and decay. This is a place where European settlers poached flora, shipping it overseas, and introduced depleting monocultures. The film begins in the mountains and travels across the terrain, cutting through the city’s suburban sprawl before reaching the port and, lastly, the shore. There’s an uncanny familiarity to the fauna. “Many endemic species have been exported to compatible regions around the globe,” he added. “California and the Mediterranean being two such areas.”
In Hartt’s frame, clouds race overhead as branches of low brush and agave lightly tremble. The gentle curvature of what appears to be a man-made reservoir mirrors the arch of a fern’s fiddlehead. His camera zeroes in on the devastation of an uprooted gum tree in the middle of the city and the withering bloom of a bird-of-paradise. The film will have audio by the sound artist Chris Watson, best known as a member of the electronic group Cabaret Voltaire. In his years as the popular naturalist David Attenborough’s field recordist, Watson made nature recordings of the area.
For Hartt, hewing closely to the research is not limiting but rather about developing a set of artistic permissions. The art exists between parameter and liberation. “When I’m actually in the field, I no longer feel the burden of meaning, I already know what the work is going to mean,” he stated. “Then I can really be present and engage with the site in a way that is all about looking through the camera, playing with depth of field, playing with composition, playing with POV, playing with exposure times. It is deeply physical and mental to be in that moment making images, and making a lot of images.” For every thousand images he makes, only a small fraction—as few as three—become artwork. Those that do are freighted with meaning.
For all its antique references, Hartt’s approach isn’t an exercise in revisiting the past. He asks viewers to question, reinterpret, and speculate on what’s possible. To make his art, to make it resonate as urgent, it is necessary to translate research into an embodied practice. Film and photography are, of course, a way of seeing, but in Hartt’s artistic production, importantly, they require presence on the part of the artist and his audience. “Travel is not an indulgence; it is essential in terms of placing myself in relation to a historical context and recognizing how things have changed,” he said. “Being in that moment, in that place, is critical.”