Hilary Harkness (born 1971) is an American artist. Her paintings frequently depict surreal worlds inhabited solely by women. She often portrays her female subjects as miniaturized figures set within complexly arranged mechanical or military environments, usually engaged in erotic, violent, or sado-masochistic scenarios.^[1][2] Her work has thus been considered Queer art.

Early life and education

Hilary Harkness was born in 1971 in Detroit, Michigan.^[3][4] Harkness was the daughter of a man who worked at a paper mill,^[5] and this gave her access to materials to make art. She was encouraged at a young age by her parents and neighbors to paint with watercolors and oil paintings.

She graduated in 1993 with a B.A. degree from University of California, Berkeley.^[3][4] College art classes sparked her desire to create art, and led her to Paris in 1993. There she discovered she wanted to be a painter.^[6] Upon her return to the United States, Harkness earned an MFA degree in 1996 from Yale University.^[3]

In 2018, she was accepted to participate in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Copyist Program. There she studied and practiced technical skills, and deep observation, with a diverse range of media, including, but not limited to, drawing, painting, and sculpture.

Queer identity

Harkness has proudly self-identified as a lesbian from an early age.^[6] Her sex and sexuality clearly influence her art.

Later, she began dating Ara Tucker, an African American woman. They married in 2015, this was the second marriage for Harkness.^[5] Her relationship with a woman of color opened her eyes and shifted her perspective on ideal beauty. She moved from depicting generic doll-like white women to depicting women of all colors. The development of her queer identity and her personal life is thus reflected in the development of her artwork throughout her career.

Career

Harkness draws on literature, history, and women’s studies to create detailed technical paintings that some critics say to be unmatched due to the intellectual historical information within each work.^[7] Her small paintings are usually priced at $250,000 dollars (USD), making her one of the most highly valued artists per square inch, at just age 31.^[6]

In her early artwork. Harkness created lesbian utopias that are populated exclusively with women depicted in traditional and stereotypically masculine roles. These early artworks consisted of small drawings and oil paintings that are scientifically detailed creating futuristic industrial worlds filled with sexy doll-like figurines as seen in artworks like wavy Sinking the Bismark (2003). The characters within the artworks are not giggling and gossiping rather they are often violent and overtly sexual creating a world where violence and sex are intertwined and have no consequences. Thus, these worlds depict women as free to behave how they truly want to.^[8]

In the mid-2000s, Harkness began to change and evolve her signature style with the goal to create medium-sized paintings with calmer compositions, and larger figures.^[9] The change within her artwork was motivated by the change within her reality. Harkness fell in love and was in her first long-term female relationship. She shifted her attention from painting hundreds of women to only a few. The shift within her career was slow; it required her to apply different technical styles including a scale to create figures that were less doll-like which can be seen in paintings like Before (2021). Furthermore, her artwork became increasingly political and controversial as she reimagined historical figures and moments with only women, making them homoerotic. The transition within her career from painting chaotic all white doll-like lesbian utopias to recreating or recasting historical events with all female characters and depicting them as a queer society rather than a hetero-patriarchal society was slow, as Harkness was nervous she would no longer be able to make a living due to a sensitive political climate.

Methodology and activism

Throughout Harkness’s career she uses a feminist approach that became increasingly more intersectional throughout her career. She now in order to not just address issues pertaining to gender, sex, power dynamics, sexuality, and eventually race. At the beginning of Harkness’s career, she depicted only white women in her drawings and paintings, excluding women of color. She stated that the lack of inclusion within her earlier cross section paintings is because she wanted the attention to be on gender rather than race. Her early artwork de-centered the male position but failed to consider a wider context and include women of all types. The beginning of her career exposes the still-existing structure of colonialism and racism within feminist ideology, most often associated with first and second-wave feminism.^[10] In 2016, Harkness became determined to interrogate her own position in relation to her artworks, the art world, and overall society.^[11] Her current practice is to remove herself and then put herself in other people's shoes, in order to create empathetic depictions. Through this process of looking inwards, Harkness is able to express ideas not only about gender and sexuality, but also race despite not being a woman of color herself.

References