Asher Hartman is a graduate of UCLA (Theater) and CalArts (Studio Art.)
Asher Hartman is a transgender visual artist, writer, director, and maker of live performances. His works, which combine strategies of theater and performance art, grapple with social and political issues in an era of chronic crisis. His works are dense, visual, poetic embodied texts infused with clown and cringe humor, evidence of trance and psychic journeying, set in engulfing installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and elicit strong feelings. A great deal of his work was developed with the support of Machine Project in Los Angeles from 2010-2017 and is currently at The Lab in San Francisco and now with The Lab in San Francisco. Asher Hartman is the director and founder of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of visual artists, actors, and performance artists with whom he has created since 2010.
Recent projects include “It’s Better to Start Out Ugly,” JOAN (2023), The Lab, San Francisco (2023), and a novel, an excerpt of which is featured in TDR (Cambridge University Press, 2022) as “Female Hallucinations, Folk Horses, and Gaunt Motherfuckers.” Other recent Gawdafful performances include “The Dope Elf,” a series of traveling plays that premiered as a large-scale live-in installation at Yale Union, Portland, Oregon (2019), then took the form of six short films presented at The Lab, San Francisco (June 2021) and a live performance, “Organized Around the Erotics of Doing You In” at The Lab (2021). Other recent publications include five short play pieces in the catalog for “Lifes” at the Hammer Museum in 2022. Past performance and theater works in include “The Lost Privilege Company,” Visions and Voices, USC, LA (2018); “Sorry, Atlantis, Or Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge,” Machine Project, LA (2017); “Mr. Akita,” Hauser & Wirth, LA, (2017); the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2017);“The Silver, the Black, the Wicked Dance,” commissioned by LACMA (2016); Mr. Akita at The Tang Art Museum, NY (2015), Purple Electric Play! Machine Project, (2014), “Glass Bang” at the MAK Center for Art & Architecture’s RM Schindler’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House as part of Machine Project’s engagement in the Getty Museum’s “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.” (2013) and with Cannonball in Miami as “The Florida Room” and Southern Exposure in San Francisco (2013), “See What Love the Father Has Given Us, Machine Project, (2012), “All Stars of Non-Violet Communication” (LACE, Highways Performance Space, Human Resources 2011), and “Annie Okay! (The Hammer Museum, LA, 2010). X Artists’ Books published Hartman’s first book of plays, "Mad Clot on a Holy Bone," in 2020.
Asher Hartman has also conducted alone, and with his (now deceased) collaborative partner, Haruko Tanaka, numerous intuitive-creative workshops at colleges, museums, and universities, including Carleton College (2022); C/O Berlin (2018); Crystal Bridges, Arkansas (2018); Philbrook Museum, Tulsa (2018); Gasworks, London (2017); The Pulitzer Art Museum (St. Louis, 2016); Perez Art Museum (2014); Real Art Ways (Hartford, 2013), Extrapool (Netherlands, 2013);The Hayward Gallery (London, 2012), The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, 2012), The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburg, 2012), among many other venues and numerous workshops with Machine Project. Recent teaching includes classes and workshops here at Otis College of Art and Design, CalArts; Art Center, Pomona College, USC, UC Riverside, Ox-Bow School of Arts in Michigan, and The Golden Dome Mystery School.
Selected Bibliography:
- "Lifes" Hammer Museum
- "Female Hallucinations, Folk Horses, and Gaunt Motherfuckers" by Asher Hartman TDR, Cambridge University Press, June 16, 2022.
- "Stuck in the Same Muck: Journeying through Asher Hartman’s Psychic Theater,” by Catherine G. Wagely, MOMUS, February 11, 2021.
- “It is Dense and Bears Repetition: Notes on Rehearsals of Asher Hartman’s The Dope Elf” by Neha Choksi, Riting.org
- “The Gawdafful Plays of Asher Hartman” by Janet Sarbanes, American Theater, October 15, 2020
- “Meet an Artist Monday: Asher Hartman” by Shana Nys Dambrot, LA Weekly, May 25, 2020
- “50 Artists Step Into the Role of President,” by Matt Stromberg, Hyperallergic, September 15, 2020
- "Skin of the Actor, Teeth of the Artist," By Asher Hartman for The Brooklyn Rail, July 11, 2016
Recent teaching includes classes and workshops at USC, Art Center, Pomona College, Otis College of Art and Design, CalArts, and Ox-Bow School of Arts in Michigan and The Golden Dome Mystery School.