About the Artist

Hartman's paintings, drawings and photographs have been exhibited in solo and group shows for many years locally, and internationally, in Barcelona in 2003 and Florence in 2005, and elsewhere. She is a member of Toronto's artist-run Gallery 1313 and of the visual arts organization CARFAC Ontario.

Hartman's work is informed by travel, study, and lived experiences spanning aspects of three centuries:
19th - as a child in ancestral rural Ontario before electricity, running water and indoor plumbing;
20th - as a suburban working teen; as an urban working adult - immersed in Toronto's bohemian counterculture (art school/Rochdale College/Coach House Press); as an avid traveller and activist in media and law; and
21st - as an artist, citizen and human in the age of algorithms, oligarchs, and the commodification of everything.

Biographical areas of note are set out below, and Artist Statement/exhibit chronology are set out here.

Art, Activism, Justice

After co-founding Liberation Media, broadcasting, touring and distributing videos made for, by and about women during the feminist Second Wave, and co-organizing the international video section of the 1973 10 day Toronto "international festival women and film 1896-1973", the artist went into law to pursue justice in equality rights and poverty law. As an independent freelance adjudicator in human rights and employment law, she raised her children, continued her art practice and found ways to travel the world on a shoestring.

A 1989 wilderness photography trip to the edge of an Arctic ice floe restored Hartman's artistic muse, and she completed a 3 year program of formal fine art study and began the series work shown in this portfolio in her 26 Lennox Street studio, located in Toronto's Mirvish Village.

Art and Photography

In addition to photographs in group and other exhibits, Hartman's photography featured in solo exhibits as part of Toronto's month-long CONTACT Photography Festival focussing on its particular theme for the year:

In May 2007 for Constructed Image, her photos of Bob Dylan taken in 1965, and of him at 65 in 2006, explored image and identity in the exhibit bob65.

In May 2010 for Pervasive Influence, her candid photos taken on streets around the world of people (common and royal) explored ideas of privacy and anonymity. As commentary on the emerging use of covert perpetual video surveillance in public places, in the exhibit L.E.N.S - Looking Everywhere, No Secrets, visitors were notified on arrival that their presence was being captured on video throughout. As a nod to anonymity, some donned the proverbial black bar on offer to pose for a 'mug shot' for the post-show digital poster titled Anonymous and Proud.

In August 2019, Hartman revisited the 2010 Anonymous and Proud poster and the subject of surveillance, privacy and identity in a solo exhibit at Gallery 1313 titled What is T.Ruth?

In May 2021 for Contact's 25th anniversary, held virtually that year due to the pandemic, her exhibit Camera Solo explored human impermanence and earthly fragility, reflecting back on her many decades of pressing the analog camera shutter with a selection of 25 photos.

Art and Community

Lennox Street Studio | Hartman Studio Gallery

Hartman's 26 Lennox Street studio/gallery was frequently opened to the public for interactive exhibits as part of Toronto's Artsweek Festival until 2005 and the annual Bathurst Annex Studio Tour, which she co-founded from 1998 to 2004. In 2006, in a Yorkville exhibit, she was part of Toronto's inaugural nuit blanche.

The Lennox Street second floor studio, which converted to Hartman Studio Gallery for exhibits, was the artist's base for over 15 years.

Almost all of the buildings in Toronto's Bloor Bathurst city block, known as Mirvish Village, were demolished in 2018 to make way for a multi-storey redevelopment. Its design retained the south and east exterior walls of her former studio at the corner of Lennox and Bloor.