K8 Hardy (born 1977, Fort Worth, Texas) is an American artist and filmmaker. Hardy's work spans painting, sculpture, video, and photography and her work has been exhibited internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, Tensta Konsthalle, Karma International, and the Dallas Contemporary. Hardy's work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. She is a founding member of the queer feminist artist collective and journal LTTR. She lives and works in New York, New York.

Early life and education

Hardy was born on October 27, 1977, in Fort Worth, Texas. Hardy uses the moniker "K8" as shorthand for her first name which she adopted while publishing zines in high school. She attended Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and graduated with a degree in film and feminist/queer theory in 2000. She studied video with Elisabeth Subrin through the Five College Consortium. Later, she worked alongside Miranda July and the Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon. In 2003, she studied at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in 2003 alongside other artists like Ulrike Mueller and Lisa Oppenheim. Hardy went on to receive an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2008.

Work

In 2001, K8 Hardy co-founded LTTR, a genderqueer feminist art collective in New York. The collective's co-creators include Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Emily Roysdon, and, in 2005, Ulrike Müller joined the collective. LTTR's mission centered on "highlighting the work of radical communities whose goals are sustainable change, queer pleasure, and critical feminist productivity." LTTR first began as a journal and eventually expanded to include live events, screenings, collaborations, read-ins, and workshops. Hardy started a color-photocopy zine, FashionFashion, in 2002. FashionFashion depicted Hardy styled in second-hand clothing. The zine morphed into a solo exhibition of four oversized books exhibited at Higher Pictures Generation in 2014 and Reena Spaulings Fine Art in 2019. Writer Andrew Durbin has noted that the zine is somewhere between avant couture and "riot grrrlesque" and features various self-portraits alongside handwritten musings on ghosts. From 2002 to 2007, Hardy and Greenwood created? New Report. The piece featured both artists playing female newscasters for a fictional radio show, WKRH, and reporting on the news. Both artists, clad in berets, trench coats, and turtlenecks, touch upon subjects such as '60s and '70s feminism, queer politics, and mental health through various different activities: burning bras, in-depth interviews, and various news reports utilizing a giant pink microphone. In 2004, Hardy performed Beautiful Radiating Energy, at Reena Spaulings. In the performance piece, Hardy stretched and exercised in front of a projected video while chanting: "I am happy; I am here; I am hurt. I'm ready!" This was the artist's first performance piece in New York. Video footage included images of Hardy's friend Math walking away from the camera, found footage of reactions to the burial of Baader-Meinhof terrorists, gay rights parades, and body building competitions. In 2017, Hardy re-staged the performance at Participant Inc. with artist Raúl de Nieves as the performer. In 2007, Hardy and Greenwood performed New Report Live at the Tate Modern in London. That same year, Hardy performed Bare Life with the musician and sound artist Stefan Tcherepnin. As inspiration for the piece, both artists responded to texts by Giorgio Agamben that revolved around his concept of Bare Life. Hardy became a founding member of Working Artists and the Greater Economy, or W.A.G.E, in 2008. W.A.G.E. was founded by the artists A.L. Steiner, A.K. Burns, ginger brooks takahashi, and is a nonprofit organization and activist group that aims "to establish sustainable economic relationships between artists and the institutions that contract our labor, and to introduce mechanisms for self-regulation into the art field that collectively bring about a more equitable distribution of its economy." In 2010, the artist created a capsule collection, titled J'APPROVE, produced by artist Travis Boyer for the 2011 JF & Son pop-up shop in New York. Hardy exhibited several sculptures and photographs in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Alongside the sculptures and photographs, Hardy organized a performance called Untitled Runway Show on the exhibition's fourth-floor. The performance included live models on a catwalk wearing  anti-couture outfits designed by Hardy. The set design was by Oscar Tuazon and the music was by Venus X. In 2016, Hardy premiered her first feature-length film, Outfitumentary. Outfitumentary is a documentary .... collection of self-portrait videos shot over ten years on a miniature DV camera from 2001 to 2011 and was premiered in 2016 at the Museum of Modern Art and at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In 2020, Hardy exhibited a single ten-foot-long green, yellow, and pink-colored painting, resembling a maxi pad, at Reena Spaulings New York. Johanna Fateman selected the piece as one of her favorite artworks from 2020. Critic Sarah Nicole Prickett and artist Nicole Eisenman have compared the work to a painting as sculpture and sculpture as painting similar to Claes Oldenburg's early soft sculptures, Frank Stella's objects, and Jackson Pollock's Cut-Out (1948–1950).

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Source:

Group exhibitions

Source:

Selected screenings

Selected performances

Public Collections

Artist's publications and text