Molly Zuckerman Hartung

I grew up in Olympia, Washington, attending punk shows and making fanzines since high school. My community was activist, engaged, and mostly working and lower middle class. Only after I moved away for the last time, at age 30, to attend graduate school in Chicago, did I begin to comprehend the utopian dimensions of Riot Grrrl, and the adjacent punk scenes of the turn of this century in the Olympia area. Now, I am a painter working with textiles, historic print materials from Playboy, R Crumb comics, Mad Magazine and other mass market desire machines from the past 40+ years. Everything is collage: I cast a wide net and trust that my experience will filter. I fondle materials – the relative weight of color and texture, brittle papers, the sag of velvets, and the rustle and slippery quality of silks and polyesters. Destruction and repair are integrated into the work through cutting and sewing bits and pieces together in a process related to but not quilting. Poetry and subjectivity drive my practice. I have curated exhibitions and led workshops on listening. Walks in the woods with my partner and dog. Teaching. Grocery shopping and reading. I place my paintings in front of the windows of our large industrial loft, so they shatter the light through colored cloth –  an absorbent prism. How can we repair the soul lag? I am mopping up the rear guard. And I am writing; poems and essays, and frequent, somewhat performative lectures, sometimes in my role as “teacher” and sometimes as “artist.”  – Molly Zuckerman Hartung