Harriet Bart "Drawn in Smoke"
Driscoll Babcock Galleries
This event has ended.
March 25, 2011 marks the centenary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, one of the most infamous and deadly disasters of the American Industrial Revolution. Records indicate that 146 garment workers, most young immigrant women, perished in the flames or jumped to their deaths from the New York City sweatshop.
Harriet Bart’s installation, "Drawn in Smoke - Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Centenary," revisits this historic event through a series of 160 elegiac drawings composed from smoke and soot. From these wispy and ethereal images emerge the inscribed names of those who died in the fire, filling the room with imagined/imaged smoke and the memory of those who perished. The lives of working class women during the first half of the 20th century has long been a source of inspiration and meaning in Bart’s work, and related installations will accompany the exhibition, inviting visitors to re-examine the complexity, scope and aftermath of this particular tragedy as they experience the installation in the present.
Bart’s work explores personal and cultural expressions of memory through the narrative power of objects, from the theater of installation to the intimacy of artist books and drawings. The artist writes, “... Using bronze and stone, wood and paper, books and words, everyday and found objects, I seek to signify a site, mark an event, and otherwise draw attention to imprints of the past as they live in the present.” Her work is included in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Walker Art Center.
Media
Schedule
from January 11, 2011 to February 18, 2011