The first thing to greet you in the James Museum’s new exhibition Spirit Lines, featuring work by Helen Hardin, is a larger-than-life photograph of the artist who looks out at the viewer. Her face is framed by quintessential seventies bangs cut just above her eyes, while her left-hand holds her right shoulder, placed so as to see her intricate jewelry more clearly. In this picture, the artist is neither confrontational nor passive; Hardin’s gaze recognizes us, the viewer, while her posture maintains a self-awareness, and this dialogue between inward and outward guides the exhibition.
IF YOU GO
The James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art
Open December 21, 2019 – March 1, 2020
150 Central Ave., St. Petersburg
$20/Adults, $15/Students and Seniors/ $10/ Child
Hardin (1943-1984) was a Santa Clara Pueblo artist born to her mother Pablita Velarde (1918-2006), a famed artist herself, and father Herbert Hardin, a government worker. Spirit Lines displays the entire set of each of Hardin’s etchings done between 1980 and 1984, the last years of her life, both with copper plate and first edition of the copper plate etching. This medium stems from a centuries-old printmaking process that involves carving a reversed design into a surface in order to print the desired image and involves several technical steps, described in a vignette of the museum space. Hardin originally worked as a painter, renowned for her exquisite details, before a gallerist encouraged her to work in etching in 1980, what she would later call “a whole new dimension.”
The figures, animals, and landscapes of Hardin’s etchings are imbued with a spiritual significance, often either drawn from Pueblo deities or personal symbology. These figures are created from thousands of lines in varying widths and patterns that form geometric designs with pensive precision. Hardin layers the subjects of her work with dimension, both meticulous and magical. Her works in this exhibition are displayed with the etching and the copper plate side-by-side to show process and product – a curatorial strategy that brings symmetry in formal opposition.
One of my favorite pieces is Contemplation, displayed in three parts next to the museum’s informational display on the etching process. In this work, a woman shown in profile is sitting cloaked in a cloth that drapes and folds infinitely set against a large circle which might be a celestial body or exaggerated halo. This swathed figure endlessly gazes out to the right, simply forward from her position, and is hung diagonally below the copper plate which shows her reversed image bathed in a luminous luster accentuated by the sharp glint of Hardin’s deft lines. A photograph of Hardin actively carving the copper plate hangs just below it, echoing the process of etching and printmaking.
The Women Series that Hardin is arguably most recognized for is also in this exhibition. Comprised of three pairings, both etching and plate, Hardin uses color and line to create Changing Woman, Medicine Woman, and Listening Woman successively. The women in this series are not necessarily representations of specific people but rather the essence of select facets of women as the artist saw them, explaining “I feel this need, this compulsion to do a series of my best works to show the noblewomen for what they are: intelligent, thinking, hard-working and spiritual.”
The first in this series, Changing Woman, is a symbolic self-portrait in which Hardin uses wide movements of golden orange hues to lead the viewer into the middle of the woman’s head, filled with zig-zagged lines conforming to its circular shape. A flattened arrow forms the mouth and leads back out to the viewer, which shows the artist’s internal transformation: “streaming from the mouth is the fact that something is going on inside me…I am changing.”
The next in the series, Medicine Woman, is particularly poignant by Hardin: she was in the middle of this etching when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1981. In this work, a diagonal line running from top to bottom brings a balanced tension to the composition, bifurcating the woman’s circular head with layered geometric features. “She is the healing spirit in the woman who calms the earth,” stated Hardin.
Finally, Listening Woman is the only of the trifecta whose triangular eyes meet the viewer’s gaze with a familiar openness. There is something enchanting about this etching, how the multitude of lines and shapes breathe with soul and bring presence to the depths of the surface. Give yourself time to convene with this woman; let her speak to you.
None of the women in this series have bodies, per se – Hardin reveals only their head and face in balance and tension, complemented by shades of yellow, brown, teal, and red. Yet they feel real and have a functional purpose in the artist’s eyes; these are just a few of the show’s many titular spirit lines.
This exhibition accomplishes the curatorial mission of demonstrating how significant Hardin was, and is, in the white-male-dominated art world, both as a Native American and as a woman – two voices still largely ignored by institutions today. The James Museum does a remarkable job of informing visitors of Hardin’s life and work by including a map of New Mexico to show geographic anchor points for the artist, examples of ceramic work by artists from Hardin’s Santa Clara community, a documentary about the artist, and more. A selection of works by Velarde and by Hardin’s daughter, Margarete Bagshaw, round out three generations of Native American women making art in Spirit Lines – an artistic lineage that bookends Hardin’s own practices. It is an exhibition indelible in both Hardin’s choice of medium and its impactful landing in the art historical canon.
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This article appears in Dec 26, 2019 – Jan 1, 2020.