New York–based artist Lyle Ashton Harris explores how subjective experiences intersect with, or contradict, cultural narratives around gender, desire, and race. Working in photography, collage, installation, and performance, he draws on Black histories and experiences from his own life to tease out the relationships between context and identity, coding and visibility. Among his photo series are Constructs (1987–1988), black-and-white prints wherein Harris pictures himself in whiteface and drag; and The Good Life (1994), vibrant portraits of the artist's given and chosen family. The Ektachrome Archive (2015–2016) documents personal moments and important figures (Marlon Riggs, bell hooks, Nan Goldin) in the 1980s and '90s, against a backdrop of AIDS activism and the emergence of multiculturalism and globalisation. The self portraits in Flash of the Spirit (2018) feature the artist donning African masks in rural landscapes of the Hudson Valley, Fire Island, and Provincetown.
Read MoreHarris was born in 1965 in the Bronx and was raised in New York and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He received degrees from Wesleyan University (1988) and the California Institute of the Arts (1990), and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (1992). From 2005 to 2012, Harris taught in Accra, Ghana, with New York University. Solo exhibitions of his work have appeared at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2020); Centre Pompidou (2018); Participant Inc., New York (2018); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2011), among other venues. Featured in the watershed Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1994), his work has been included in many group exhibitions, including the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) and Whitney Biennial (2017). Harris is represented in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Tate Modern, London; and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich. Harris received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation (2016), the David C. Driskell Prize (2014), and the Rome Prize (2000).
Text courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
