“The Key To Life Is To Stay Fluid”: Claudia Hart In Conversation With Anika Meier

Claudia Hart: Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot on what it means to be an artist because of where I am now. I recently prepared my first retrospective and museum show, and I’ve been invited to create another exhibition that draws from my own history.

That process made me think about how my story fits into the larger history of technology and art. The crossover between power, art, and technology has always interested me. Through this self-research, I was able to identify specific moments I hadn’t been sure about before. I can now pinpoint exactly when I began. It was in 1984, at the end of my 29th year, when I was invited to curate an exhibition at White Columns.

At that time, I already wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t think you could simply become one. I believed artists were born, not made. Since I had studied sciences and math before moving into art history, I thought that path excluded me from making art myself. So I started by writing and thinking about art. Later I went to architecture school because I assumed you could train to be an architect, but that art required something innate.

Like Vincent van Gogh. I thought an artist was someone insane, a crazy person.

My mother was very interested in art and had cultural aspirations for me. She often took me to museum shows, and I attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School for children. I remember she brought me to a Van Gogh drawing exhibition, which I think was at the Met. I also remember going with her to the opening of a Barnett Newman show at MoMA when I was eleven. I can still recall exactly what I was wearing because I was so excited to be there – a green blazer.

Yes, she was definitely indoctrinating me. But even with all that, I still didn’t feel like an artist. I thought being an artist meant being possessed and crazy.

I first studied math and science because that was where my natural talent was. But my mother had these cultural aspirations for me, so I learned to draw and do those kinds of things. Drawing was part of becoming an architect. To be a designer, you had to know how to draw.

Through all of that activity, I was eventually invited to curate, and at the time I was also an editor at I.D. Magazine, which was founded in the 1950s as an experimental design magazine.

I studied art history at New York University, where my professors encouraged me to write. After graduating, I applied for an editorial position at I.D. Magazine, which was being relaunched at the time. Working there drew me into the overlap between art and design, which soon became my main interest.

While interviewing Holly Solomon, whose gallery was central to the Pattern and Decoration movement, a movement tied to the decorative arts, and also a feminist and queer art scene addressing identity politics, I became fascinated by how art, design, and performance intertwined. Holly introduced me to her son, Tom, who ran White Columns.

Through that connection, I organized a show called House on the Borderline in 1984 about the art/design crossover. I didn’t think of myself as an artist; I believed I was designing a kind of fantasy architecture using the work of other artists. But during the process of creating the show, something shifted. I felt possessed, as if the project had taken control of me.

I gathered together 51 artists. Some offered existing works, others making new pieces. I was very young, but looked younger, so people often thought I was 18, which helped me persuade them. House on the Borderline became unexpectedly successful, and through that experience, 

I did this show, and it got a lot of reviews. People took it seriously. I was amazed and thought, “I want to do another one – but this time, I’ll make the art myself!”

I was living in a tiny apartment on 8th Street, and was part of the downtown alternative scene, playing bass in a band called Foolish Virgins. The band had one guy who led it and a few girls who played instruments. I was very involved with CBGB and the punk scene at that time. Patti Smith lived across the street from me. She was my hero. I used to watch her perform at CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, and the downtown queer club scene.

Working with artists on exhibitions and writing about them taught me something important: You could just make art! It didn’t require a lightning bolt of inspiration. So I started painting in that small apartment in the East Village and completely destroyed it. It had industrial carpeting, and I painted right over it. Once I started, I painted obsessively, like someone possessed. That’s how it started.

At the time, art and design crossover included performance and theatrical actions. It was then called “intermedia” art. Artists might make films, photographs, or paint on walls, build sculptures, creating entire worlds. That experimental approach defined the moment when I began.

So that is how I started, as an intermedia artist. In my first show, I made a Super 8 film, paintings, sculptures, and photographs, to create installations that were almost like movie sets or theater.

When I look back at my life, I realize I was very open and willing to try new things, and willing also to be fluid, to go with the flow. Then as I grew older, I began to notice patterns. The secret, I think, is both to move with the flow and to stop at times to analyze and redirect.

When I taught graduate students at the School of the Art Institute, many were rigidly goal-oriented: I must reach this stage of my career by this age, get into this program, be in the Whitney Biennial, and so on. It was not good for their art. There is even a term for it, MFA-ification. It sterilizes creativity.

Every creative person I know shares this tension between intuition and reflection – the balance between following the current and steering the boat.

It does give you a certain freedom when you realize it’s hopeless anyway, so you might as well do whatever you want.

I come from a generation where, as I said, the scene I was involved in was largely shaped by gay men. They were my mentors because they too were outsiders in their time. There were very few women, and I was lucky that these men were sympathetic to me as someone also seen as hopeless by the rest of the world. But they were still men, and the art world reflected that.

This speculative market really emerged in the 1990s along with the browser-based internet, a Wall Street financial boom, and collectors like the Saatchis. It all developed hand in hand. Women artists, with rare exceptions like Louise Bourgeois, were excluded from that level of market recognition. Even Louise was rediscovered late, with support from people like Pat Hearn, who gave her one of her early exhibitions that reintroduced her to a younger generation engaged in gender politics.

If you don’t have the prices, you’re erased later. And I think part of the work you’re doing now – bringing women like me and my peers back into focus – is helping to counter that. We are part of art history. We’re not nothing. But without market value, we are always in danger of disappearing.

Now that I have more insight and can see these patterns, my goal is equity in the marketplace. I want to sell my work and use that insight to recontextualize myself within art history. Seeing these patterns makes me more focused on positioning myself within the larger historical frame.

Lately, I’ve been making short documentaries. I just finished one about my friend Copper Giloth, who is my age and a real friend. Artists like us are, in many ways, the true experimentalists. It was a mixed blessing: being undervalued gives you freedom – you can do whatever you want – but it also means living with limited means.

But let’s forget equity for the moment. What about simply being able to live from our art? I don’t need millions of dollars, nor do I want to be Van Gogh or Beeple. I just want a stable, modest life and the ability to live from what I create.

I began to understand the importance of the market when I did a project for the Armory Show in New York. The original Armory Show from 1913 had become the Armory Art Fair. Robyn Farrell, curator of the Kitchen, was invited to organize a thematic exhibition about the history of the Armory, and I was part of it.

While researching, I discovered that there had been 215 women in the original 1913 Armory Show. I was looking specifically for painters since I was painting at the time, and realized I had never heard of any of them. Some seemed extraordinary – as good as Matisse or Derain – yet completely forgotten.

When I looked deeper, I found that many of these women had been important figures in Fauvism, the early modern movement. Over time, they were literally written out of art history because their auction prices were so low. The market had erased them.

That realization became an epiphany. I created a project called The Armory Women to bring them back into art history by reproducing their works, mixing them with my own, and building monuments to them. The project was exhibited at the Armory Show and is now part of my retrospective. I’m also in discussion with several institutions in the U.S. about showing parts of it.

My goal was to restore these women to the narrative of art history. Their market value will probably never recover. You can still buy their works in small, secondary auction houses. But their artistic importance deserves recognition. If I had the means, I would buy those paintings myself.

I guess that’s what everyone hopes for – that if you work hard, it eventually gets easier because you’ve achieved certain things.

But I actually think if it feels too easy, you’re probably doing something wrong. Being an artist isn’t just about managing the market or pleasing the orthodoxy of the moment. If you’re doing that, maybe it becomes easier, but it also keeps you confined to the context of the time – lots of group shows, but never the spotlight.

The real challenge is balancing an authentic personal voice with an understanding of where you fit in the present moment. It’s like constantly switching hats between listening to your inner voice and strategically figuring out how to make it visible.

Everyone I know who does something truly interesting does that. And it’s never easy.