Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Hilary Harkness in conversation with Ksenia Soboleva and Jerry Saltz

Please join us for a new episode in this series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, this time with artist Hilary Harkness, art historian Dr. Ksenia Soboleva and art critic Jerry Saltz.

Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948 (October 12, 2023 – January 27, 2024), and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.

Hilary Harkness (b. 1971) meticulously fuses Old Master 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’s first solo exhibition with PPOW Gallery, Prisoners from the Front, was on display in fall 2023.

Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation on art, AIDS, and lesbian identity in the United States. She is currently working on a book project titled Friendship as a Way of Art: Queer Identity and Visual Citation. Soboleva is a regular contributor to the Brooklyn Rail and BOMB magazine, and her writings have appeared in various exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. She teaches at the New School and NYU.