ARTIST BIOGRAPHY



Jenny Hartt paints from the uneasy intersection of perception, memory, and system, where the personal and the technological define what it means to see and to endure. As a young artist, Hartt worked transactionally in illustration, producing scientific and commercial drawings in ink and graphite before entering a long professional chapter in the life sciences and healthcare innovation fields. The shift was driven by fascination with the subjects she once only depicted, and by the pressure of her mother’s catastrophic illness - a neurodegenerative paralysis that left her fully conscious but unable to move or communicate for the last six years of her life before dying of aspiration at forty-seven. Her mother had been both artist and engineer, a programmer on the Apollo missions and for air-traffic control at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.

The experience shattered any illusion of stability or hierarchy between art, science, and survival. Hartt came to understand the body, and life itself, as both miracle and system, though for years she believed technology and medicine were the more noble pursuits. Creativity seemed like privilege rather than necessity. Her return to art, newly as a painter, became an act of rebuttal and reclamation - of time, empathy, and the right to see without institutional permission.

During those years, she continued to collect visual ideas, building a photographic archive. She also worked furtively on a mental canvas daily, sometimes making entire complete works in the mind's eye, working out how to represent form, feeling and color, all while her outward activity tended to family and innovation management. Then nighttime dreams of painting began in 2021 and she decided she needed to externalize art before resigning as a life sciences seed fund Managing Director at the end of 2022. More importantly, she began to feel that all of the arts are, as human activities, of utmost, primary importance. They need to flourish as much or more than we need life extension.

Hartt holds undergraduate (2001, summa cum laude) and graduate (2006) degrees in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is completing Certificates in Painting Studies through the Rhode Island School of Design and in Figurative Studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her studio opened in Philadelphia in 2025. She has exhibited locally, opportunistically, including CFEVA’s Calm Before the Storm (2023), while otherwise catching up dearly.  She would like to pursue an MFA where she would further explore the relationship of solitude to our political, technological and social moments.

Recently, Hartt has been questioning what happens if machines remain instruments of ownership rather than agents within the economy. If they produce and decide without ever being compensated or allowed to speculate, they become tools of extraction rather than participants in exchange. Such a hierarchy would eventually collapse under its own asymmetry. For Hartt, the question is not whether artificial intelligence can make art, but whether it can ever want something, ever take part in the fragile web of speculation and uncertainty that makes human economies, and human art, alive.

In both her artistic and professional work, Jenny Hartt treats observation as an ethical and creative act. It's also a magical act, asking that we watch until we see something we had not before.