HARRIET BART: RECKONING

On View: October 8 - December 3, 2022 

Weekdays: 10:00am - 4:00pm or by appointment

ST. PAUL, MN—NewStudio Gallery, in St. Paul’s Creative Enterprise Zone, proudly welcomes Minneapolis-based international artist Harriet Bart and her installation, Reckoning. The exhibition opens Saturday, October 8, with a free public reception from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. Gallery hours are 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Monday-Friday. The exhibition closes Saturday, December 3. 

Among art collectors and museum curators, Bart needs little introduction. Her work is included in many museum, university, and private collections. She has experimented with genre and materials, and collaborated with artists and writers for more than four decades, creating exquisitely executed work of refinement and detail, symbol and materiality. 

Bart creates evocative content through the narrative power of objects, the theater of installation, and the intimacy of artist’s books. At the core of her work is a deep and abiding interest in the personal and cultural expression of memory. Using bronze, stone, and gold leaf; wood and paper; books and words; and quotidian found objects, Bart signifies a site, marks an event, and draws attention to imprints of the past as they live in the present. Despite the variety of material and subjects, Bart maintains a consistent aesthetic and set of themes that enrich each object and tableau. 

For Reckoning, Bart created a tableau that evokes memory, archetype, and symbol. “I was captivated by NewStudio Gallery’s space, low ceilings, and sense of compression,” Bart says. The installation includes a table setting that “reflects on the past, what we’ve had, and what we might lose,” she explains. In front of the table is an array of harrow disks, each of which holds an element of significance: an animal bone resembling a mask, a stone similar to an axe handle, a model of barn Bart constructed, a burl from a tree, a bronze-casting of a soapstone owl. Above every disk hangs a plumb bob. Under Bart’s gaze and through her aesthetic, every object in the installation has undergone transformation. Other works, some available for purchase, are also included in the exhibition. 

“We live in a broken world,” Bart says. “Reckoning is a cautionary tale. The narratives I create are told through objects and images. Some of the objects in Reckoning are relics of the past; others, artifacts of the present. Objects in this installation also are from the natural world, collected cultural commodities, or created or altered in the studio.” 

Beginning as a textile artist, Bart was a cofounding member of WARM (the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota, one of the first feminist art collectives in the United States) and of Traffic Zone Center for Visual Art in Minneapolis, where she has her studio. 

During her career, Bart has commemorated the lives of the forgotten from the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 in New York City to American troops killed in Afghanistan. She has drawn inspiration from wide-ranging sources, from medieval incantations to objects found on her global travels. She has sought imaginative ways to represent the self, from categorizing the arc of a woman’s life in five sculptural garments to presenting her autobiography in 70 test tubes, one for each year of her life. Across her practice, Bart has called on her Jewish cultural heritage, collective memory, and her own personal experience to produce an intensely creative and innovative body of work.

 Bart’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Germany, and she has completed more than a dozen public art commissions in the United States, Japan, and Israel. She has received fellowships from the Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Yaddo, NEA Arts Midwest, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Since 2000, she has published more than a dozen artist books and numerous mixed-media bookworks. She has won three Minnesota Book Awards, most recently in 2015 for Ghost Maps.

Exhibition events are free and open to the public. Several artworks from Harriet Bart: Reckoning are available for purchase from NewStudio Gallery.