Events > Discussion Series

26 Feb. 2021

Art Metropole x PMVABF’s Classroom program series

Artist
David Hartt
Time
3:30–5pm ET
Art Metropole is proud to present: Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica, with Charmaine Nelson, David Hartt, Frances Loeffler, and Jonathan Middleton.

As part of Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair’s Classroom program series, this conversation takes up the subject of artist David Hartt’s recent poster project for Art Metropole designed as an advertisement for Charmaine Nelson’s book, Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (Routledge, 2016). These wheat-pasted posters, soon to be on the streets of Toronto, incorporate a photograph Hartt made in Jamaica and uses the language of guerrilla street-art advertising campaigns to promote an academic text that confronts the history of systemic racism in pre- and post-colonial Canada. Hartt’s project points to his own perspective as a Black Canadian now living in the United States, responding to recent events in the US, but also to how these histories are usually suppressed, and how systemic racism continues to be deeply embedded within Canada as well. Presented by Art Metropole.


David Hartt (b. 1967, Montréal) lives and works in Philadelphia where he is an Assistant Professor, in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. His work explores how historic ideas and ideals persist or transform over time.

Forthcoming solo exhibitions include The Histories at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Coloured Garden at The Glass House, Connecticut and the group exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

His work is in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, The RISD Museum, Providence, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

In 2018 Hartt was the recipient of both a Pew Fellowship and a Graham Foundation Fellowship, in 2015 he was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant, in 2012 he received an Artadia Award and was named a United States Artists Cruz Fellow and in 2011 he received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.

Hartt is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, David Nolan Gallery, New York and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin.
  1. David Hartt - SLAVERY, GEOGRAPHY AND EMPIRE IN NINETEENTH-CENTUR