Tanya Hartman: So That I May Carry You With Me

January 31 - May 31, 2015 Admission

This exhibition will survey four recent series of work by Kansas City-based artist Tanya Hartman, including her most current undertaking, now in development, which will premiere at the Daum. Throughout her art practice, Hartman has created work that has spiritual depth and social meaning—poetic, intelligent, empowering—but one that also stands on its own as pure visual aesthetics. Her current project comprises 10 portrait paintings of people living in the Kansas City area who have come to the Midwest from around the world as refugees from genocide, political upheaval, and societal breakdown. The sitters are painted in a realistic, but painterly manner, presented in front-facing, half-length poses, casually dressed, a set-up that might be derived from the photograph on an identity card. But this format is also the pose of a person in conversation, and represents the act of talking with the artist, relating the details of complicated lives and journeys. Hartman seeks to underline the relevance of her sitters, their inherent value as individuals, and to claim for them the right to be seen as subjects, not just the objects of history.