|
|
|
 Vallarta Living | Art Talk | January 2005 
Artist Profile - Anton Haardt
 Anton Haardt and her husband, Chris Moses, have lived part-time in the jungle village of Yelapa for about 20 years, and have been making their own art for over thirty years. While Anton collects and deals Southern outsider art, her own art is heavily influenced by the tropical surroundings in Yelapa and her travels throughout Mexico and South America.
 The Mexican term "saquachismo," taken from the Spanish verb "saquear" [to steal or plunder] and "chismo" [tales of gossip,] appropriately describes Anton Haardt's recycle theme - you take it, you use it, you tell it in a literary or visual way. And from her palm-roofed studio in the jungle hillside of Yelapa, away from the noise and commotion of Puerto Vallarta, Anton Haardt paints her own personal vision of the world.
In your observations of the work of Anton Haardt, you might be struck by the irony and the ecstasy of a peasant woman carrying a perfectly iced white wedding cake on her head; or you might get caught on a crowded zocolo in a rubber plantation boomtown on market day; or you may sense the weight and smell of a decapitated pig's head happily being held by a small boy...
Haardt exercises a visual scrutiny of existence through the dissection of detail, filtered through a sharp and uncanny vision that usually is the stuff only of our dreams. "Anton understands so well the perspicacity of the child in us all that she is able to transcend the passivity of pure form... she is the child conjurer. Sacks of torn paper, potato-stamp stencils and assorted stacks of cryptic images are her tools from which she plumbs talismanic messages from her own psychic depths..." (Thomas Moore, former professor and chair, art department, Huntington College)
"Haardt's images suggest figures ripped from multiple layers of wall paper in a Victorian boarding house. There is a quality of harsh reality dominating the mood, affectedly commenting on the temporality of possessions through a vivid visual perception..."(James Nelson, Birmingham art critic)
 Anton was born in the Deep South of Alabama. Her uncle was H.L. Mencken, the well known Baltimore critic. Her aunt was Sara Haardt, a writer of southern fiction in the 1930's. Anton began painting at the age of eight, going with her Mammy Zora to an old and rickety third floor studio for classes taught by an aged Mrs. Wilkerson. She developed an ongoing interest in folk art in the early 1970's after she met self-taught painter Mose Tolliver, who lives near her family home in Montgomery. Later, Anton attended Washington University and the San Francisco Art Institute, where she earned a degree in printmaking in 1971.
Over the years her love of travel took her to Mexico City where she lived in the Zona Rosa and attended clases at El Molino. Later she gained admittance to Instituto Allende and lived for a year in San Miguel De Allende, where she studied many art mediums. In 1982, she opened Anton Haardt Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in Montgomery Alabama, and in October 2001, she another opened another gallery on Magazine Street in New Orleans. Both galleries display works by academically trained and self-taught artists from the American South, as well as traditional art from Latin America.
Her galleries also feature a large body of Anton's artwork in a variety of mediums; including painting, printmaking, collage, assemblage and photography. In recent years her photographic portraits of self-taught artists have been reproduced in a number of books, periodicals and exhibition catalogs, including an exhibit of her photographs at the Los Angeles Art and Craft Museum in April 1997. In 1980, her work were exhibited at the Montgomery Museum of Art.
 After years of living all over the United States and exhibiting her art in Atlanta, San Francisco, Alabama, St Louis, New York and Paris, Latin America's tropical climate and rich culture still drew Anton. So in 1980, when her travels brought her back to Mexico, she decided to buy a home in Yelapa and spend part of every year living and working there.
Anton Haardt is a visual artist who uses her experiences from traveling, working and learning about new ways of life for inspiration. When asked, Anton can weave a web of remarkable stories about her travels in Spain, Morocco and North Africa; riding 2nd class buses through Mexico, taking boat rides through the Amazon, and traveling by train to the tip of Argentina. Her images of palm trees, Lotto Games, brujas and market scenes are interpreted in a magical, surreal way . . . blending dreams and reality.
Anton has had permanent expositions at Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, BFM Gallery in New York City, Gallerie Etienne in Paris France, and her work is part of the Blount Collection at the Sarasota Museum of Fine Art. Her art works can be viewed on her website AntonArt.com, or seen by appointment at her tropical retreat on Calle Huachinango in Yelapa. |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us