Tanya E. Hartman
Tanya Hartman came of age in New York City, where she attended The Brearley School. Large portions of her childhood were also spent in Cuernavaca, Mexico and in London, England. She was educated at The Rhode Island School Of Design, where she obtained a BFA in Painting in 1987. Between 1992-1994 she was a graduate student in Painting at Yale University. After her graduation from Yale (MFA/Painting, 1994) she was a Fulbright Scholar in Stockholm, Sweden. She now teaches painting and drawing at the University of Kansas where she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Art. She is represented by Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri and is the recipient of numerous grants and awards.
My art addresses loss and uses a visual language composed of a diverse and sometimes contradictory array of processes. The choice to bring disparate and incongruous materials into proximity reflects my view that the experience of reality is complex and layered with both beauty and suffering. I have always felt that making art is an act of love and defiance because it reveals the truths that unite us across cultural boundaries and geographic barriers. It is my hope that each story heard in the creation of my work, whether it was the throb of my own pain or that same insistent rhythm observed in another, has the capacity to reveal both the brutality and the enduring goodness of the human heart.
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