Commissioned by The Glass House, David Hartt’s project A Colored Garden features the first artist-designed garden to activate the 49-acre site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in New Canaan, Connecticut. Hartt’s work explores histories lying dormant in the landscape with speculative narratives that provide a playful, exuberant, and vibrant counterpoint to the surrounding grounds.

Reflecting on the Glass House’s recent transformation from a storied private home to a publicly accessible historic site, A Colored Garden considers the site’s potential to foreground new possibilities for social, political, and cultural engagement in the contemporary moment.

Encompassing photography, video, sculpture, music, and installation, Hartt’s research-based practice investigates the interplay between culture, the built environment, and the communities that shape and are shaped by these concepts. Typically, he begins a project by identifying a particular idea that he considers unstable and changing—for example, nationhood or late capitalism—and subsequently locates a site through which he can complicate and spatialize the idea. When speaking about his work, Hartt has stated, “I’m prompted to develop a practice from a sense of being overwhelmed by history. There is a need not to tear down but to reinvent and remap one’s own experience onto an existing infrastructure.”

Located in the southern meadow just below the Glass House, Hartt’s circular garden spans 40 feet and comprises an array of flowers—including peonies, daisies, zinnias, and phlox—that bloom sequentially, creating a variation of height, texture, and color. The selection of flowers correspond to the plant varieties found in the paintings of Charles Ethan Porter (1847–1923), a Black artist whose poetic still lifes, landscapes, and portraits were celebrated by well-known contemporaries such as Frederic Church, Edmonia Lewis, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Mark Twain.

Although Porter studied in New York and worked for a time in Paris, his work is firmly rooted in and inspired by Connecticut, where he spent most of his life. In an 1883 letter to Mark Twain, Porter wrote, "I am aware that there are a goodly number of my [Connecticut] friends and others who are anxious to see how the colored artist will make out, but this is not the motive which impresses me. There is something of more importance, the colored people—my people—as a race I am interested in, and my success will only add to others who have already shown wherein they are capable the same as other men.”

Hartt selected the title for this work—A Colored Garden—as a provocation that signals Porter’s identification as a “colored artist” as well as the garden’s capacity to function as a metaphor for race within the landscape.

When designing the garden, Hartt took inspiration from David Whitney’s contributions to the Glass House site. As a well-known curator and Philip Johnson’s partner for over 40 years, Whitney exerted considerable influence on the evolution of the landscape, including the creation of colorful gardens, many of which are no longer extant. The circular shape of the garden also echoes Johnson-designed elements within the site as well as Donald Judd’s site-specific concrete sculpture.

As part of a year-long residency, Hartt is working on a related film that reflects on the Arcadian ideals represented in the site’s landscape as well as The Burial of Phocion, a painting attributed to Nicolas Poussin that stands inside the Glass House. Hartt’s film will center on a performance of new music by the cellist and composer Tomeka Reid.

The roving camera will capture Reid’s performance and her exploration of the site’s pastoral context. At times, Reid will wear a mask designed by Hartt that is reminiscent of a work by Oskar Schlemmer, a polymath associated with the Bauhaus whose work Johnson collected and donated to The Museum of Modern Art. The mask also functions as a vessel that holds cuttings from the garden on top of the dining table in The Glass House.