EVERYTHING FOR YOU (Black Dog Press, $49), a lush monograph of the artist’s work with essays by Lynne Tillman and Ashley Jackson, charts the evolution of Harkness’s work, as the anonymous pillaging mannequins give way to figures with actual names, history, and the capacity for connection, specifically Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, along with Josephine Baker, Henri Matisse, and the disembodied head of Ernest Hemingway. Here, the military-industrial complex has been supplanted by absurd and tender vignettes of domesticity, but thankfully, no lesbian-bed-death jokes necessary. Harkness is much too playful, much too generous for that cliché.
One woman stands at the center of Harkness’s most recent work, “The Arabella Freeman Series,” envisioned as “a love letter, or bedtime story,” for the artist’s wife Ara, who is Black. Inspired by Winslow Homer’s 1866 Prisoners from the Front, Harkness composed a fictitious Civil War narrative about a prosperous, Black landowning family in Virginia. If her early paintings are studies of frenetic sexual compulsion, this is an exercise in voluptuous devotion and rapture, from the rippling brushstrokes in the bark of the trees to the consummation of forbidden desire between Arabella and a white Union general, complete with a gender-reveal twist. In this verdant pastoral fantasy of a queer, anti-racist past, bodice ripping is inevitable. And in Harkness’s world, it’s the general who surrenders. Free the nipple, indeed.