K8 Hardy


K8 Hardy is a New York-based artist. She holds a BA from Smith College, studied at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, and holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College.
Hardy is a founding member of the queer feminist journal and artist collective LTTR, and has directed music videos for groups including Le Tigre, Lesbians on Ecstasy, and Men. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has been exhibited and performed internationally at venues including, MoMA PS1, Artists Space, The Tate Modern and Galerie Sonja Junkers among many others.
Hardy is most famous for fashion, but she also works through performance art, Video art and sculpture.

Early life and education

Hardy was born on October 27, 1977 in Fort Worth, Texas, and began spelling her name K8 as a teenager while working on, and publishing various zines. She attended Smith College, in Northampton, MA, where she studied film, alongside feminist and queer theory. Through the Five College Consorstium she studied video with Elisabeth Subrin. During this time, she received a grant to work with Miranda July and the Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon. Upon graduating from Smith College in 2000, Hardy moved to New York City and began working as a stylist for clients including Fischerspooner. In the following years, she studied at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, and in 2008 received an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Selected works

TV Lip Synch (2002)

Hardy collaborated with Wynne Greenwood in the making of TV Lip Synch, a video in which the two artists lip sync to various daytime-television clips including scenes from Oprah, a soap opera, and a Barbara Walters interview, all programs marketed towards women.

Beautiful Radiating Energy (2004)

Beautiful Radiating Energy is a performance piece in which Hardy, dressed all in white, makes gymnastic contortions in front of a projected video while shouting "I am happy; I am here; I am hurt. I'm ready!" in a variety of ranges that require a month of vocal training. The video projected includes 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.

New Report (2005–2007)

Hardy and Wynne Greenwood play "Henry Stein-Acker-Hill" and "Henry Irigaray", fictional news reporters for the fictional news station WKRH, whose tagline is "pregnant with information". Their names are references to feminist theorists Luce Irigaray, Edith Stein, Joan Acker and Patricia Hill Collins. As Wynne Greenwood sometimes works under the name Wynne Ryan, WKRH is an acronym for Wynne K8 Ryan Hardy. The two, clad in berets, trench coats, and turtlenecks, report on news such as bra burning and running water and interview a friend suffering from anxiety. The press release states, "If traditional activist video was invested in the communication of clear messages to a target audience, the work makes politics by making television speak differently as it addresses the emergent qualities of a community for whom visibility is less a goal than a means of dismantling dominant images... If the revolution will be televised today it is only by queering TV in order to encounter the desires of the subjects and histories it addresses."
In 2007, Hardy and Greenwood performed New Report Live at the Tate Modern in London. Their report focused on the multiple meanings of power and they dubbed the Tate the "structure of power". Other forms of power discussed were colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and the war in Iraq. "The artists invaded and occupied an iconic structure of power, symbolic of omnipresent patriarchal structures of power within the art world and society at large".

Bare Life (2007)

In this performance project with musician and sound artist Stefan Tcherepnin, the two respond to Giorgio Agamben's concept of "Bare Life".

Hair Zer Kunst (2009)

Begun in 2009, Hair Zer Kunst is the collective collaboration between K8 Hardy and NYC hairstylist, Shaun SureThing for Seagull Salon. Drawing from inspirations such as Vidal Sassoon structure, Bauhaus and Brutalist architecture, Hair Zer Kunst is a study in the movement of hair, the theoretical movements of architectural structure and the moments, un-captured, between the stillness of a haircut and its documentation. Revisited/revisited in 2016, Hair Zer Kunst seeks to strip down the conversation structure even further. The baseline for Hair Zer Kunst having been laid in 2009 seeks no other noise to join its chorus. Hair Zer Kunst is decidedly singular. Away from the male gaze by design but aligned, otherwise to nothing. In its current state, Hair Zer Kunst has no objective; No motive, no alliances and no opinions. It reflects the viewers own degree of cultural saturation and identity cooperation. Hair Zer Kunst only knows one thing: "Men don't like it much."

Position Series (2009–)

Position Series is a group of photographs which employ the tropes of self-portraiture and abstract photography.

Outfitumentary (2016)

A video documentary on K8 Hardy's changing fashion styles from 2001 to 2012. It was shown in Museum of Modern Art in 2016.
Through the experience of shooting the artist's daily attire with video camera, the document also ends up serving to become visual capsule of time and place, specifically, what it was like living in New York during the span of the work's creation.

Exhibitions and collections

Solo Exhibitions

  1. 2005 "New Report " - Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, NY
  2. 2009 "Position Series" - Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, NY
  3. 2010 "FeminismFormalism" - Galerie Sonja Junkers, Munich, Germany
  4. 2010 "Freeing the Natural Voice, on the Perpetual Horizon of Devastation, Some Notes on Lying" - Hard Hat, Geneva, Switzerland
  5. 2011 "K8 Hardy" - Galerie BaliceHertling, Paris, France
  6. 2015 "NEW CUTS K8 HARDY" - University of California, Irvine

    Group Exhibitions

  7. 2009 "Reflections on Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video" - Brooklyn Museum, NY
  8. 2010 "50 Artists Photograph the Future" - Higher Pictures, New York, NY
  9. 2010 "Fluorescent Adolescent" - Schunck: Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts, Heerlen, The Netherlands
  10. 2010 "Greater New York" - MoMA PS1, Queens, NY
  11. 2012 "Whitney Biennial" - Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
  12. 2014 "Looking Back: The Eighth White Columns Annual" - White Columns, New York, NY
  13. 2015 "Outfitumentary" - Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, NY
  14. 2016 "Outfitumentary" - Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
  15. 2020 "" – The Menil Collection, Houston, TX

    Works cited

*