BOFFO INTERVIEW WITH ARA AND HILARY

Ara Tucker and Hilary Harkness

Interview by Sydney Fishman and Ray Toomer

Edited by Samuel Getachew

Wednesday, June 12, 2023

Ray Toomer (Residency & Festival Coordinator): Ara and Hilary, welcome! You’re finally here. Welcome to the BOFFO Residency Fire Island 2023! Wooo!!

Sydney Fishman (Programs Manager): You've landed, you've made it! In anticipation of Fire Island and your BOFFO residency, is there anything that you've been looking forward to?

Hilary Harkness: I've been looking forward to community. I'm here at a very special moment in life. I'm at a hinge age —I recently turned 52 and am about to have my first solo show in over a decade this fall. It's my emergence as a mid-career artist. For many decades, I haven’t felt safe in the lesbian community. Even though I had a girlfriend in junior high and high school, in college and throughout my 20s, I had trouble finding more than a partner with whom I could truly feel connected to. The lesbians were hiding in plain sight - growing up, there was a closeted couple down the street and I could not tell they were lesbians. But, I persisted in painting the worlds of camaraderie and open flirtation that felt like something straight people could take for granted. By the time I debuted in 2001, it was a time without social media and it was harder for artists to speak for themselves.

The press didn’t know what to make of me, a woman married to a man, painting sexy women in traditionally male spaces (battleships). Lesbian writers were especially unkind to me and my work. At one point, I was called “a femme, at best.” The mistreatment was bewildering to me because I wasn’t that unusual; lots of lesbians of my generation were married to or in relationships with men but for some reason, I was suspect and my queer identity, which I never lost, was erased and I was put on notice that I didn’t belong. Not surprisingly, my marriage couldn’t withstand that sort of scrutiny and judgment. We parted in 2006, and I’ve been with women ever since and I still identify as a lesbian. .

But I have great love and respect for my ex-husband. It’s wonderful that he and Ara have their own connection as fellow writers. It's a moment of healing to be welcomed into a historically gay male community that has become welcoming to everyone, which I think is so important since exile from community is a special kind of hell. 

BOFFO is coming at a time where I can feel renewal and optimism for this next chapter as lesbian auntie at large who is dedicated to mentoring those up and coming lesbians so that they can have what I didn’t. 

Ara Tucker: I’ve been looking forward to the idea of pace on an island, excluding Manhattan island. [laughs] It forces you to move more slowly and think differently. A lot of creative breakthroughs that I didn't force have happened on islands. I'm just excited to be on one, as Hilary mentioned, where it's not necessarily a space that is actively calling and saying, “come here, do this.” I think BOFFO has done a good job of expanding the idea of what community can look like, whether it relates to sexual orientation or artistic practice. I love that there's room for a writer who dabbles in visual media and for a painter who is at this hinge moment and of us are welcome.

Ray: Wow, gorgeous! We're glad you feel welcome. I always talk about how time moves differently on this island. I'm glad you are picking up on that already.

Sydney: I'm curious, Ara, with you being a writer and Hilary, you being a visual artist, do you feel like writing and painting exist in the same world? How do those things sort of differentiate in medium? 

Hilary: I feel like I've always been stuck between two worlds. My paintings always have a huge backstory and I’m trying to pull out what's important to bring forward visually. When I had a rotator cuff repair a couple years ago, I wrote drafts for two novels. My brain can go back and forth, but it tends to be hard to shift gears within the course of a day.

Ara: I've been thinking about this. My LinkedIn doesn't actually say CPO, it says storyteller first. For me that is the intersection of all the things that I do. 

I think about, when I was younger, what was I doing? Sure, I was scribbling out stories, but I was also doing painting, and I always have some sort of visual reference that I'm trying to write through or write about. What I've settled on is that we're all trying to tell some sort of story in some sort of way. Whether it's legible is another story. 

I try to find the medium that fits whatever I'm trying to say. Words have always come faster for me, or using mechanical intervention, like a camera, still or moving. I've been trying, with Hilary's help, in the last few years to actually trust my hand and allow it to express things visually and not just in a literary way. I've been surprised at how hard it is to trust that muscle in ways that I don't even think about other muscles, like writing or speaking.

Ray: Ara, that makes me think about your Black Abstraction project, which is inherently interdisciplinary. How do you think all of the mediums used there work together? Put differently, how would you describe your practice?

Ara: Definitely interdisciplinary. When I was an undergraduate, I did an installation atelier. I was thinking about how so many of my classmates couldn't wait to fill their rooms with all sorts of things. And people would walk into mine and be like, “are you done?” I had this tiny screen playing a documentary that I made, these panels of text on the floor, and white walls. On some level, I think I exist in this virtual white cube in my head where I'm constantly trying to curate my life experiences into something that I can reflect back and display to the world. I've tried to approach it almost like a curator, where I don't want to be limited by one thing. For me, the idea of abstraction is on some level meant to pull disparate pieces together and create something legible.

Being Black on some levels has been the most illegible to me of all pieces of my identity. I’m able to incorporate that lived experience with the experience of visual culture, which is also deeply lived — I've grown up around art and the idea of art since I could see and talk. The idea that to be Black is to have an experience that can also be abstract and not a readily figurative or narrative experience has been something I've been trying to play with all my life. 

Sydney: It’s interesting to frame it from the curatorial perspective, which I can relate to as a curator. I often find myself thinking about the way people interact with the work or the space within the work, or even how the public is going to approach it. In creating these multidisciplinary spaces, online or in-person, how do you think about the way people approach it?

Ara: Some of my earlier visual references juxtaposed Lorna Simpson and Barbara Krueger, and the idea that both were playing with image and text. Barbara Krueger comes from a more commercial place, like marketing, as in “you will feel this and think this and do this.” With Lorna Simpson, I wasn't sure what she wanted me to think or do. This idea that words and text and images can exist together easily or along a spectrum has always been interesting to me. What I'm realizing is that both the beauty and the difficulty of the diversity of the world is that my references are not everyone's references. It's been great to be in creative collaboration with Hilary and understand that sometimes I'm being a lot more obscure than I even intend.

In terms of what my audience experiences, I think about the Stephen King mindset, of just go do the thing and don't worry, and then come out and think about what it means. I'm trying to really not think about what people need to get out of it and give myself permission as the first audience member to create the thing that I want. Like with writing, I often write the stories that I wish I could have found earlier. And with visual culture, I also am creating the images I wanted.

In college, I was taking photographs of my family with a medium format camera, just regular poses. But I would also be excited about a taco truck or a sneaker, and my photography professor was so disturbed by the abstract ones. He would ask, “why don't you just keep taking photos of your family? Those are great.” He was probably right from a critical standpoint, but at that moment I took it as, “you can't do anything meaningful unless it has Black faces that are doing things we haven't seen.” 

I kind of rebelled and didn’t see the power of those images, but I'm coming around. In my documentary Black Like Us (2000), I tried to integrate the personal with other people's experiences and purposely denude the individual so that the work wouldn't be pigeonholed. So when I'm making work, I hope that it’s not like “this is by Ara, and this is for Ara,” but rather “this is by Ara and it can be entered or experienced by a wide variety of viewers.”

Hilary: I think that Black Like Us is a really nice time capsule now. I have a show coming up in October and it’d be nice to screen it so that people can see our experiences side by side. The video is wonderful, it should be seen. 

Sydney: You're supportive of each other in a unique way. I love the way you talk with each other. It feels like there are layers of intimacy that we can't see. Can you speak to the influence of your relationship on the end product of your work?

Hilary: We're both oldest children, meaning we're both protective of our own voices. But we are very much about making space for others to be heard and making sure that everybody is respected. I would by nature like to be a private person and be protective of my family, but I feel like it's my job as an artist to be very honest about my experiences, including as a white person in a relationship with a black person. I walk beside Ara’s shoes, not in her shoes. My background is that I was the working class, lower middle class white kid bussed downtown to the majority black schools. It's still a learning experience. Ara’s family has embraced me and allowed me to make mistakes; and they have encouraged me to paint diverse experiences, including those that depict African Americans.

We have to feel like we can be safe, reaching out, wanting to understand, knowing that we are all one, but at the same time we're not a monolith. I just really applaud BOFFO and The Pines for making a space for us all to be together to learn from each other.

Ara: The way I think about our relationship … I grew up playing tennis from a young age, and my earliest lessons were with my dad. There was a point where he acknowledged that he needed to get me an outside coach. There's humility in acknowledging when your kids have surpassed what you can give to them. I think I've benefited from seeing that gracious way of being both a player and a coach, in my relationships.

Hilary's studio space is in our home, so sometimes I come in straight from my corporate job where all we do all day is brainstorm, give feedback. That's the hallmark: can you give honest, continuous feedback? But then I realize, this is now her space. Is this a coaching moment? What do you need? And I'm not great at that sometimes. We have a shared understanding that if there isn't safety between us, it's going to be very hard to find it externally. So we benefit from really working at it. It’s like a muscle, it's not just this inherent thing. There's obviously a kinship that helps, but it is an active everyday practice as we evolve.

We have the benefit of lived experiences that are additive and that we wouldn't have had alone. I don’t know what it would be like to be Hilary and she doesn't know what it's like to be me, but we can definitely know what it's like to sit in that player's box and watch the person doing their best every day and getting cheered and booed, and knowing that the work you put in before the match is gonna carry them. And when they're done, you're right there waiting for them to come off the court and ready to play another day.

Hilary: When we got together, she said, “you've painted all your other girlfriends. I am your muse now.”

Ray: Incredible! [laughs] It sounds like your marriage itself is a creative collaboration. I know you’ve collaborated a bit in the past and you obviously have separate practices. How do you see yourselves collaborating in the future or while you’re here? 

Ara: Well, Hattie the Skull, in my photographs, is a skull from Hilary’s studio.

Hilary: I wanted to do a good job on a character I hadn’t painted yet, Mrs. Antoinette Freeman. So I went online and bought a replica of an African-American female skull. Ara was looking at it and adopted it as her ancestor. So now Hattie's always with us. Ara’s photographed with it. And when she wakes up before me, she'll come into my studio, play with my clay, leave stuff behind.  

Ara has her own path. As you can tell, she has a coherent visual point of view and literary point of view. 

Ara: It’s always very interesting that I get passes at who I get to portray. I mean, a lot of my characters are white or straight and nobody's saying I can't write about that, because on some level that is the objective culture in which we live. I am so blind to the sensitivity that Hilary faces around depictions. I'm like, of course you can paint that, you should paint that, I want more white people to paint people who look like me or who have histories that don't involve slavery. I'm here for it, but I don't know if we've created enough of a safe space or enough well-intentioned people to really understand that inclusion is like a prism.

It's not just like a bidirectional or a unidirectional set of permissions for minorities to take on majority culture. It's actually an ability for those who are observing and curious to reflect back what is often taken for granted or left to the minority. Some of doing the work is what Hilary's done by courageously saying, “I may get flack for this. People might not understand. I might be giving up my own privilege in terms of what would be easy to digest coming from me. And I'm actually gonna go where my curiosity takes me.” 

Whether or not we will continue to collaborate openly, I don't know if the world will ever be able to see our collaboration in traditional terms. And I'm actually okay with that. You know, I think “muse” is a limiting term, particularly when it's used with women in relation to men as makers. 

What's more interesting is that we’re married. We consciously chose to do that. And I take that super seriously, not just the commitment that I've made to Hilary, but living openly and honestly and transparently. I think that is also a gift that we can offer. And if people give us credit, that's great, but I'd rather just know that we can make our work and feel like it's okay to coexist creatively.

Sydney: I want to thank you both for being so open. It really sets a beautiful example for this transparency that's so needed and for how we can have art spaces that can exist for the purpose of understanding these complicated ideas. 

Ara: Another thing I'll say is that representation matters. Being in the Pines now, I've always envied my gay male friends because I think they always had a playbook for what community looked like, for what loss looked like, and what it means to both celebrate and to grieve in public. And I feel like as a lesbian, I have friends who identify as lesbians, but we never had a collective until the L word. It always felt like we were a tangent. I like that in being here, I don't feel like we're a tangent. I take anything we can do to counter-program that sense of loneliness really seriously. It’s especially important for artists.

Sydney: Definitely. Do you feel that we can rely on the art world to allow space for that?

Ray: Boom! [laughs]

Ara: Well, I think the art world is also not a monolith. I want us to be more clear-eyed about the paths to the positions that enable these decisions. Whether it's board membership, curatorial positions, development directors, the folks who really run institutions, gallery owners and dealers, collectors. I think a lot about both the institution and the image that we create around those positions. And I think there's a lot more agency that we stand to gain with the more power that we reclaim from commercial systems.

I think that money is not a dirty word. Artists should be paid what they're owed. The dynamic has shifted where artists are much more responsible for their own making both of their work and of their brand or identity. Galleries need to think about how they might continue to support that evolution in a way that is commercially viable and yet also creatively viable in terms of the generation and dissemination of ideas. 

So when I think about diversity, I think a lot about socioeconomic diversity and diversity of opportunity and of network information and the sharing of how things actually get done. What I love about Hilary's Instagram right now is that she's one of the few artists who's like, okay, real talk: if you're thinking about an MFA, like here are the things to actually know. If you're thinking about doing this thing with a collector who might be shady, here are some things to know. 

Sydney: That’s incredibly refreshing again, that transparency. It feels so lucky to have you both here, and that you really are just so open and ready to get into discourse and share knowledge.

Ray: We’re so excited to see how these next few weeks unfold.

Ara Tucker is an artist and storyteller whose practice focuses on the intersection of race, class, gender, sexual orientation as well as intergenerational memory and trauma with a particular interest in how these intersections warp daily life. In addition to using third party platforms such as Instagram and LinkedIn for site-specific artistic and culture-shifting multimedia interventions, she has designed I'm Here Too, a website dedicated to storytelling in multiple forms (visual, audio, literary).

Tucker often employs her wry sense of humor to transcend traditional observations of how the New York City artworld operates through projects including a blog as the Art Dealer’s Daughter; a novel How to Raise an Art Star; and Spilling the Tea, a Kwanzaa-themed takeover of her wife Hilary Harkness’s Instagram account. Ara also produced Black Like Us, a documentary video exploring the lives of an intergenerational group of affluent African Americans.

A three-time alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Fiction, Poetry and Non-Fiction, Tucker received a degree in Art History and Visual Arts from Princeton University. Tucker, who also received a JD from the New York University School of Law, currently serves as a member of the MoMA PS1 Board of Directors Executive Committee and as Chair of the Audit Committee.

Hilary Harkness (b. 1971) fuses Old Master painting tactics with a distinctly contemporary sensibility to explore power dynamics, war, and gender through an intersectional lens. Her work explores interpersonal dynamics through a lens that allows power struggles inherent in sex, race, and class systems to play out on an uncensored stage. Harkness earned her BA from UC Berkeley and her MFA from Yale University. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Yuz Museum Shanghai; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; and the Seavest Collection, New York, NY; among others. In 2017, she received the Henry Clews Award and participated in the inaugural Master Residency Program at the Château de La Napoule in France. She has lectured widely at leading academic and cultural institutions. In 2014, she co-curated Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors at The FLAG Art Foundation. Harkness is represented by PPOW Gallery in NYC. A solo exhibition at PPOW Gallery will open in fall 2023.

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