how lovely the ruins,

how ruined the lovely

Dave Hardy, Carole Harris, Dorothy Hood

May 20 – June 19, 2021

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present how lovely the ruins, how ruined the lovely, an exhibition of sculpture, painting, collage and textile art by Dave Hardy, Carole Harris and Dorothy Hood. The exhibition takes its name from the poem “There are birds here” from The Big Book of Exit Strategies by Jamaal May, Alice James Books, 2016 and will be on view from May 20th through June 19th, 2021.

Dave Hardy’s sculptures are assembled from quotidian materials often salvaged from city streets, such as table frames, display fixtures, sheets of glass, and incorporate household materials like pens, modeling clay, and pretzels. These materials are manipulated by Hardy using an extensive process of compression, allowing the resulting sculptures to appear weightless and fluid despite their substantial heft. This contradiction is inherent in the work, which combines seemingly unrelated elements to achieve an elegant spatial calligraphy, suggestive of classical form as much as the junkyard heap from which the original materials emerged.

Carole Harris’ wall hangings call to mind scrap metal as much as they do home quilts- with ragged edges and uneven seams that weave through the fabric. Harris cuts, pieces, stitches and dyes the fabric, using both old and new materials, off-the-bolt cottons and fancy silks, paint, and printed textiles to form surprising and revealing compositions of texture and gesture. Often drawing inspiration from her native Detroit, the quilts retain a rawness despite their polish and meandering like the city in unforeseen spurts and directions. Harris’ works encapsulate the beautiful accident of urban life and the patina of time that accumulates in objects and memory.

A juxtaposition of shapes and materials also inhabits the work of the late artist Dorothy Hood, whose collages and paintings explore both a metaphysical and literal landscape. Born in Texas and educated at RISD, Hood achieved significant acclaim in her home state, but eluded fame in the larger art world, partly due to her long residence in Mexico from the 1940s-1960s where she traveled in the circle of artists, literati, and intellectuals such as Pablo Neruda, Frida Kahlo and José Clemente Orozco. She began to make collages in 1982 and, while lesser known than her large-scale abstractions, the collages contain the same significant spatial explorations that characterize her canvases and put her among pioneering female abstract painters such as Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Lee Krasner. This exploration of space and landscape was especially significant in the 1960s, when Hood returned to Texas and was immersed in the vastness of the Western terrain just as the exploration of outer space captured the world’s imagination.

These matters of space—imagined, real, metaphorical and metaphysical—unite the artists in the exhibition across time and materials, pressing us to consider the full dimensions of perception and how to interpret fractured forms as holistic presences.

Dave Hardy (b. 1969, Sharon, CT) is an artist who works primarily in sculpture. He attended Brown University (BA 1992), Yale School of Art (MFA 2004) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2005). Hardy’s work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. Solo exhibitions include Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris (2017); Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles (2017); Galerie Jeanroch Dard, Brussels (2016); Wentrup Gallery, Berlin (2014); Churner and Churner, NYC (2014); Regina Rex, NYC (2013) and Art in General, NYC (2009). Selected group shows include Tibor De Nagy (2016), Invisible Exports (2015), Bortolami (2014) and Jack Shainman Gallery (2008) in NYC and Studio la Città in Verona, Italy (2019). His work was included in the Queens International at the Queens Museum (2016), Greater New York 2005 at PS1/MoMA and Make It Now at Sculpture Center in NYC (2005). In 2018 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and he received a NYFA Fellowship in 2017 and 2011 and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park, NYC in 2005. He was resident faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in summer 2018 and in 2019 he was the Warhol Fellowship Resident at RAIR in Philadelphia, PA. His work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal.

Carole Harris (b. 1943, Detroit, MI) is a fiber artist who has redefined and subverted the basic concepts of quilting to suit her own purposes. She received a BA from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI). Harris has exhibited across the United States, in Michigan, and internationally, including the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI); Museum of African American History (Detroit, MI); The River Gallery (Chattanooga, TN); National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center (Wilberforce, OH); and Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, AL). Harris’ work has been published in several books and her work has been reviewed by several newspapers and magazines. In addition to her studio career, Harris was the owner of an interior design firm based out of Detroit, MI. Harris has been a constant advocate for the arts and education for over thirty years as a lecturer, mentor, curator, juror. She served on numerous art and education panels and as well as visiting critique for a number of art schools in Michigan. Harris has sat on several boards, among them; Inside Out Literary Arts, African Renaissance Theatre, Pewabic Pottery, Board of Visitors for the College of Fine and Performing Arts; Wayne State University and the Board of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Dorothy Hood (b. 1918, Bryan, Texas d. 2000, Houston, Texas) established herself as a pioneer of modernism from 1937, first as a scholarship student at the Rhode Island School of Design and briefly at the Art Students League in New York City, before settling in Mexico City in the 1940s. There, she would spend two decades embedded in the rich cultural fabric of a city in the midst of post-war and post-revolutionary bohemia. She befriended leading artists and intellectuals including Pablo Neruda, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Mathias Goeritz, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo. In 1962, Hood returned to Houston and had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Witte Museum, San Antonio, TX; Rice University, Houston, TX; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; and her work is in the permanent collections of numerous American museums. During her lifetime, Hood’s work, from her formally rigorous yet metaphysical and intimate abstract paintings, to ink drawings on paper and collages, garnered an impressive exhibition history and support from influential critics, curators, and collectors. In 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas (AMST), Corpus Christi, organized a major retrospective of Dorothy Hood's works and published a monograph about her life and career which culminated in the exhibition and book entitled The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: DOROTHY HOOD (1918-2000). In the fall of 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented an exhibition entitled Kindred Spirits, Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood, mounting an unprecedented visual dialogue between the works of both artists. Hood’s estate is represented by McClain Gallery.