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Five Favorite Works of Art with Hannah Hart | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios

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Duration:08:31
Uploaded:2017-09-21
Last sync:2024-11-21 19:30
We met Hannah Hart in her studio to talk about everything from painting to poetry -- here are Hannah's five favorite works of art:

1) Little By Little by Hannah Gelb (available here as a print! https://store.dftba.com/products/little-by-little-art-print)
2) The video Why Trust Is Worth It by Ze Frank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWypWe9UAhQ
3) Biwa Lake Tree, Study 2 by Michael Kenna
4) Little Red Riding Hood by Cory Godbey
5) Any poem by Mary Oliver

Thanks, Hannah. We (h)art you.

Find Hannah around the internet:
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/harto
twitter: http://twitter.com/harto
instagram: http://instagram.com/harto
tumblr: http://mydrunkkitchen.tumblr.com
facebook: http://facebook.com/hannahhartofficial
snapchat: @hartoooo

To support our channel, visit: http://www.patreon.com/artassignment.

Thanks to our Grandmaster of the Arts Indianapolis Homes Realty, and all of our patrons, especially Lynn Gordon, Patrick Hanna, and Constance Urist.

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 (00:00) to (02:00)


(PBS Digital Studios logo)


Sarah: This is Hannah Hart.

Hannah: Hello!

Sarah: If you watch YouTube, you probably know her.  In 2011, she started her series My Drunk Kitchen and since then has starred in feature films Camp Dakota and Dirty 30, published a cookbook in 2014, and in 2016, a memoir titled Buffering and also posts insightful and funny and punny videos of many types to her channel MyHarto, and she has a brand new and really awesome show on Food Network called I Hart Food.  This is her new and very nifty studio space, which has this very well equipped kitchen.

Hannah: Which I hopefully will do work in soon.  

Sarah: There's also a lovely sitting area with a magnificent artwork, too.  It's the impressions of the posteriors of Hannah and her friends and frequent collaborators, Grace Helbig and Mamrie Hart.  What is this show about?  I've forgotten.

Hannah: I'm Hannah Hart and these are five of my favorite works of art.

This work, by Hannah Gelb.  Hannah Gelb is one of my oldest friends.  We've actually been friends for over a decade now, which is astonishing, because I feel like it was just yesterday that we met while studying abroad in Japan.  

Sarah: So what does "Little by Little" mean to you?

Hannah: "Little by Little" means that sometimes the changes are so small and incremental, you don't really notice them, but they're still happening.  On here, we see like a bunch of vines and pomegranate flowers, I don't know, something, but there also are like, flames coming out of them, maybe?  It's a pretty cool work.  But when a vine is growing or when a plant is growing, you may not notice it each day, but then some days you look and suddenly you're like, oh!  A bud!  And it seems to have appeared from overnight.  I think it's a really good reminder of how the changes that we try and make in ourselves might seem small at first but then all of a sudden, you're going to have this moment when you realize how far you've come.  

Sarah: How did you come to own it?

Hannah: For New Year's Eve, Hannah sent me this work and it's the original and it's the only one that exists unless you buy it as a print at DFTBA.com/hannah.

The video "Why Trust is Worth It".  


 (02:00) to (04:00)


So this video is by Ze Frank.  It--I've only actually seen it recently, though it's been on the internet for a long time.  It is a collaboration with Cirque de Soleil and a thinkpiece, you know, really like a thought that Ze put together about trust and it's beautiful.  It's a beautiful--it's like poetry.  It's like a  mix of words and motion.  

Sarah: Actually, it's precisely like this.  

Ze: (?~2:23) says that trust is like a fork, not one way, in many ways.  Physical, emotional, and maybe something else.  I almost imagine trust as these invisible hands that we stretch out into the world looking for someone to hold on to as we walk into the unknown future. 

Hannah: The two performers in it work with Cirque de Soleil and so they have to trust each other to accomplish their goals and I feel like that this point in my life, that's really something I'm conscious of, is trying to um, figure out where and how to lean, to support a greater balance.

Sarah: So why do you think this has been watched more than 3 million times?  Was that all you?

Hannah: Maybe it's 'cause they're two really fit people like, gyrating against each other?  I'm gonna go ahead and guess it's probably that, but whatever it is, it really worked.  

Biwa Lake Tree, Study 2 by Michael Kenna.  The image is a film photograph, so he took it on film and the fact that it's on film, I mean, that exposure's insane.  You can't see anything but white, and here you have this tiny tree.  Like, I keep trying to picture where he took it and visualize what's around it and I can't and I love that.  I think about it metaphorically and I feel like that metaphor changes over time.  When I first saw it, I was actually in a really difficult time in my life and this solitary tree really stood out in isolation to me.  Like, it seemed like a very isolated image and now, when I think of it, I think of all those elements, like, thinking about wow, this tree is in an environment.  We just can't see it.  Like, where does this tree exist?  And that, for me, has some, that has some significance.  

 (04:00) to (06:00)


Sarah: So Hannah has a big book of photos by English artist Michael Kenna, but this is the one that really stood out to her, so much so that she bestowed it with the highest honor any artwork can aspire to: laptop background status.

Hannah: This image I kept on my desktop for my laptop as the background, the wallpaper, for years and at the time, I was really good about keeping my desktop organized.  Right now, my desktop, ever since I learned how to screenshot, screen--it's a, yeah.  My girlfriend can't even look at my desktop 'cause it's so upsetting.  It's just thumbnails.  So there's no art behind there now.  It feels very cluttered.  (gasp)  Maybe it's about creating space.  Yo!  Art!

This print by Cory Godbey.  I saw this image online on Etsy and it was like, back in, like, the, like early days of Etsy and it's the first piece of art I've ever bought and I think that in and of itself is pretty special to me.

Sarah: So what are we looking at here?

Hannah: It's an image of a girl walking through the woods and it's Little Red Riding Hood and she's got a lantern with her and behind her are these trees, these very tall, thin trees and behind the trees is a massive wolf.  You can see the figure completely, but its eye really stands out which is the same color of the light that the little girl's walking through the woods with, so I have really attached a lot of meaning to this.  For me, I use it as a metaphor for my own mental health struggles or my own mental health victories, which is about learning to walk alongside your wolf, because we can see in the bottom of it that the paws are lit.  The light is there.  She can see his paws, so she knows the wolf is right there and she is walking through the night alongside it.  So it's a metaphor to me about not running for your demons, or from them.  Running for them.  I mean, unless they're doing a 10K.

Any poem by Mary Oliver.  I think I first came across Mary Oliver when I was living in San Francisco.  I just graduated from college and it was like, the market had just crashed and I've always been a fan of poetry.

 (06:00) to (08:00)


I studied under Robert Hass who was like, the Poet Laureate at the time or like a former Poet Laureate.  

Sarah: Yep.  Robert Hass was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997.  He has also won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, among other accolades.  

Hannah: As much as a fan of poetry as I am, I'm also only really drawn to specific kinds of work and I feel like, I feel like that might be true for everybody, 'cause I've heard a lot of people say, like, I don't get poetry.  I don't connect to poetry and I'm like, there is a poem out there that you will connect with.  There is.  You just haven't found it.

Sarah: So what is it about Mary Oliver's poetry then?

Hannah: For me, Mary Oliver's poetry has this kind of groundedness but at the same time, like, like, ephemeral quality to it, I guess.  You know, a lot of her poems talk a lot about nature and animals and the woods and just general observations on nature and its life and death cycle. 

Sarah: We'll give you an example here from her collection A Thousand Mornings.  "I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable.  What shall, what should I do?  And the sea says in its lovely voice: excuse me, I have work to do."  

Hannah: Like, it makes me feel really connected to the Earth and like I am a part of the planet and that makes me feel beautiful too.  

Sarah: Any final thoughts?  

Hannah: The type of art that usually resonates with me is something that catches me off guard, like I didn't even know I was about to be exposed to something that was artful and beautiful and like, hit me in the chest, you know?  Kind of like with music.  Like when you hear "All Night" by Beyonce and you're just like, this is beautiful and perfect.  Yeah, and it clicks.  I don't know, it's just like, you know it.  You feel it.  You know when art is doing some--it's just, it's not even between you and the artist.  It's between you and the work.  It's like that work is speaking to you and you are allowing yourself to listen.  

 (08:00) to (08:31)


Sarah: Thanks for coming on the show, Hannah.

Hannah: Thank you so much for having me and if you guys want to hang out more and talk more, you can find me across the board on the internet @harto, H-A-R-T-O.  

(Endscreen/Credits)
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