Molly Zuckerman-Hartung

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Q: You and what Army? A: Both of them!, dye, latex, oil and enamel and on canvas and sewn velvet, 63" x 57", 2020.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung (born 1975) is a contemporary American painter and writer. She creates abstract, process-based works whose experiments with disparate materials and methods such as collage, sewing and assemblage, push beyond traditional notions of painting and verge on the sculptural. Critics characterize her approach as dialectical—both carefully considered and provisional —and identify in the work a handmade, punk culture-like rejection of conventional taste and consistency that is paired with a deep regard for the diversity and history of painting.

Zuckerman-Hartung has exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum, Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), MOCA Cleveland, Blaffer Art Museum and Indianapolis Contemporary. Her work belongs to the collections of the Walker Art Center, MCA Chicago, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Carnegie Museum of Art, among others. She is a critic at the Yale School of Art and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Early life and career Zuckerman-Hartung was born in Los Gatos, California in 1975 and grew up in Olympia, Washington. In 2000, she was one of the original organizers of the non-profit music and art festival, Ladyfest, which in various iterations has had a global reach in subsequent years. In 2015, Zuckerman-Hartung moved to New York City, and subsequently to Connecticut. The former show took a subtle approach to gender, employing surfaces of scrawled words and numbers, phallic drips and graffiti, pours, stains and shapes made by removing pigment with bleach, with absences becoming form (e.g., How Much Such a Little Moon, 2015). Her work, "The 95 Theses on Painting" (2012), is a manifesto-like text widely used in university painting courses in the US.

Zuckerman-Hartung is an associate professor at UCLA's Department of Art. She was a senior critic in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art and a critic in painting at RISD; she has been a faculty member at Yale since 2015. Frye Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and has received artist residencies from Ox-Bow, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Yaddo and the University of New Mexico, among other recognition. In 2021, the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston presented a survey of Zuckerman-Hartung's work accompanied by a monograph, titled Comic Relief.