Heather Hart
The Oracle of Connection
Courtyard installation, 2022
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND DAVIDSON GALLERY, NEW YORK
Artist Statement
I grew up searching for myself. My father took us to the Archives regularly and we were able to trace most of his family to 1860, where slavery robbed identities. But we were never able to find my great grandfather’s mother, Minnie Wells, further than the 1870 census. In 2011 I took a road trip that led me from my home in Brooklyn to the very small Maney’s Neck, North Carolina, following my father’s family line, that geographically splintered after slavery and before my greats moved north. After listening to mixtapes and podcasts, far out of range of my GPS, I found a local library in the nearest town. There I found a microfiche for an 1877 marriage license of my great grandfather’s father. It was a marriage between Winnie Wells and Julius Hart. But I knew her name was Minnie. With a one-letter error in transcription, Minnie had disappeared for over a century.
Our “factual” records are full of errors like these: a census taker’s handwriting or the subject’s accent changes a name or a race or a date. And that changes our history (our truth?). Even more often folks are left out of the records altogether. Yet our hegemony tells us these records are the facts, thus relegating oral histories and indigenous records to fictions.
I’m captivated by this slippage, this liminal space between truth and fiction, oral histories and written histories. Through my interdisciplinary practice, I fuse fabricated and historical belief systems, legends that have been bequeathed through generations mixed with invention and intuition. I create new rituals to empower the individual. I make oracles.
The oracle for Chattanooga will have the appearance of an independent rooftop, removed from its house, and dropped from the sky onto the Stove Works grounds. It could also suggest a house that has been buried or sunken into the earth, leaving an island of house to climb on. As with all legends of oracles, the methods of building my rooftops are passed from person to person. Carpentry was taught to me by my father. As a child, the hot asphalt shingles of our roof, which I had helped lay, was an oasis where I could bake in the sun and listen to music while reading. My Roof offers a space for visitors to climb atop and claim for their own for a bit, literally changing their perspective on their world as a metaphor for a potential ideological examination. While the attic inside my Roof is more private and contemplative by nature, and it asks the visitor to crouch beneath to access its private space, as attics do, finding it full of history, secrets, and fantasies.
For this oracle, I have been thinking about visibility and audibility of intersecting communities that makeup Chattanooga and the Stove Works neighborhood. I was looking for manifestations of the intersection of this desire for communication/connection, with my fascination with threshold spaces and with the site itself. The threshold between what I say and what you hear. And I was ultimately inspired by the idea of change, of growth and of community stakeholders. I want to continue to mine my experiences in Chattanooga and use, as a connective tissue, voice.
I want to reflect on the idea that this rooftop space may be “claimed” by anyone, that their frames of reference and activation of the piece is critical to complete it. For the site-specific heart of the oracle, I want to house a microphone. It will be a place for visitors to speak their minds or play music through a connection to a caged speaker inside the chimney. The oracle amplifies voices. To further hone in on the concept of the liminal space, I want to plan a series of public programs to stretch the identity of the rooftop oracle through the activation and interpretation of each event.
I am interested in this kind of enigmatic nature of a space. It exists simultaneously inside and outside, the underground and the visible, private and public, minimal and handmade, the spiritual and the natural. The content of a form may further transform depending on who experiences it and their perception, which is what happens to legends that are handed down in their oral tradition: transformation. A rooftop can refer to home, stability, shelter, but in this context, it is also an action of claiming power- of influence, direction, and earth. This roof is a site of cosmic afro-futurism and ancient native legends.
- Heather Hart
ABOUT Heather
Heather Hart, based in Brooklyn, is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the power in thresholds, questioning dominant narratives, and creating alternatives to them. She was awarded grants from Anonymous Was A Woman, the Graham Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation, NYFA, and Harpo Foundation. Hart co-founded Black Lunch Table in 2005 and has won a Creative Capital award, Wikimedia Foundation grants, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant and an Andy Warhol Foundation of Art grant with that project. Her work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, Storm King Art Center, The Kohler Art Center, NCMA, Eastern Illinois University, Seattle Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and University of Toronto, Scarborough among others. Hart is an Assistant Professor at Mason Gross School for Art + Design, a member of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, an external advisor for AUC Art Collective, and a trustee at Storm King Art Center. She works with Davidson Gallery in New York and studied at Skowhegan, Whitney ISP, Cornish College of the Arts, Princeton University and received her MFA from Rutgers University. Hart is a 2021-2022 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
ABOUT STOVE WORKS
In November 2020, Stove Works opened its 27,000 sq. ft. Arts Center located in the southside of Chattanooga. Stove Works offers three core programs: Residency, Exhibitions, and Education. Rooted in an intention to highlight the Practice of Contemporary Art, we ask our audience to do more than passively view artwork. Stove Works seeks to use Art to encourage conversations, inspire reflection, and to provide opportunities to learn from the experiences of others.
All of our programs are designed with fluidity in mind, allowing us to not only guide but to respond. As winds shift and new challenges are introduced into our lives, we maintain programmatic flexibility that allows us to adapt to and embrace those shifts. Our goal is to cultivate a climate and culture in Chattanooga that stimulates curiosity amongst its communities, enthusiasm for exchange, and openness to new ideas and contrasting perspectives. And, ALL of our public programs are FREE to attend.