Lannie Hart was born in Jacksonville, Florida and raised in Lawrenceville, Virginia. She holds her BFA from The Virginia Commonwealth University. In 1987 she opened “Lannie Hart Design”, a packaging design studio in New York City. She taught Polymer sculpture at Brookfield Center for Crafts in Brookfield, Connecticut.
Lannie has varied interests spanning crafts to fine art. She has managed to combine all these media into one voice. She has shown her work at The Wayne Art Center, Wayne PA, Freedman Gallery, PA, Pelham Center for the Arts, The Katonah Museum, Katonah NY, The Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond VA, Museum of American Crafts, NYC, Silver-mine Gallery, New Canaan, CT, Hampton Roads Gallery, Southampton, NY, among others. Some of the juried craft shows she has participated in are Westchester County Crafts, NY, Fine Crafts at the Armory, NYC, Paradise City Crafts, MA and others. She has been published in Artspeak, Village Voice, Art News and others. Lannie Hart is a member of the SOHO20 Gallery since 2009.
Speaking about her latest body of work Lannie Hart had this to say;
A voyeur is a person who likes to watch, but does not participate. For the male voyeur, it is not merely about what he is interested in, namely the woman as sex object; it is also about what he is not interested in, namely the person inside the woman’s body. Her original thoughts, abilities, and emotions are irrelevant. The voyeur does not want to experience the woman; he only wants to watch her.
One could say that the notion of men objectifying women is not new anymore; it has been a central topic at least since the dawn of the feminist movement in the late 1960’s, or perhaps earlier. But even if not new, the notion has not lost its relevance. Some say that things are very different now; more and more women are doctors, lawyers and athletes. Hart does not find this particularly convincing. Women in today’s movies might be action heroes; but they still tend to be shapely and wear skimpy outfits with stiletto heels. They may run for president; but the media still focuses on their hair, clothes, and physical stamina. As the French say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
In her show “Voyeur”, Lannie Hart explores the present state of objectification of women. Her small brass boxes with lit windows, called “View Boxes”, pull the viewer into an erotic scene, turning the viewer into a voyeur.Hart’s “Sightings” is a wall installation containing three shelves with headless women standing in a paradisaical garden surrounded by glass eyes. For those glass eyes, once again a woman’s head is irrelevant.
All the other pieces in the show similarly explore how far we have come, and how far we have not come.