How 5 LGBTQ+ Art World Couples Inspire Each Other | Osman Can Yerebakan | Artsy
Painter Hilary Harkness and writer Ara Tucker began their relationship on April Fools’ Day in 2013, but their bond became serious soon after. Brought together by a mutual love of racquet sports, they have since been intertwined in each other’s work lives, as much as their romantic lives. For example, Harkness created the cover art for Tucker’s 2022 book of surreal comical short stories, How to Raise an Art Star. Conversely, Harkness has also integrated the figure of Tucker—who has been shown in battle scenes or as a model for Josephine Baker—into her paintings that rewrite stories of mistreated historical female figures with a titillating edge. Agency and curiosity inhabit her heroines’ effortlessly determined ambitions. Warriors, aristocrats, rebellions, and sexual beings, they claim their real estates in tales of yore, painted in Harkness’s brisk gestures.
When Harkness came back home from her first day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Copyist Program in 2018, she decided to make a new version of Winslow Homer’s 1866 Prisoners from the Front, but paint the soldiers as Black. This became the “Arabella Freeman” series, named after a historical, fictional free Black woman, shown in Harkness’s recent solo exhibition “Prisoners from the Front” at P.P.O.W, her first in a decade.
Between Tucker occasionally taking over the painter’s Instagram account and Harkness snatching objects—such as a skull—from her partner’s writing studio to implement into her paintings, the couple has cultivated an organic form of creative exchange. “As a queer couple, we are trying to demystify things and bring others along with us instead of slamming any doors behind us,” said Tucker.
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Note to readers from Ara: A few corrections to this lovely profile:
How to Raise an Art Star is a full-length novel that began as a series of vignettes that I typed out on my iPhone during my commute to/from work starting around 2014. I would send these missives to my beloved who read each one eagerly and with her keen eye for story. From there, a world and eventually a novel and animal spin-off (Tails from the Alley) was born.
I’m actually the one who snatched the skull from Hilary’s studio and began to call her “Hattie”…we now share joint custody.