Lyle Ashton Harris

Lyle Ashton Harris (born February 6, 1965) is an American artist who has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photographic media, collage, installation art and performance art.

Harris uses his works to comment on societal constructs of sexuality and race, while exploring his own identity as a queer, black man.

Born in the Bronx, Harris was mostly raised by his chemistry professor mother Rudean after she divorced Harris's father, between New York City and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

Harris has expressed the impact of the absence of his father as a large impact on his personal and emotional development, which would later be shown through some of his pieces, including his collaborations with his brother, Thomas Allen Harris.

While in Dar Es Salaam, Harris and his brother were sent to an English-speaking Swahili school.

Harris believed it was important to his development as both an artist and a black man to live in a country in which black people were in positions of power.

He valued his time spent in Tanzania, as it was a sharp contrast to the school he attended in New York City.

Harris spent a lot of his childhood with his grandparents, including his maternal grandmother Joella, who he has featured in his art, was a missionary and his grandfather was a treasurer for Greater Bethel AME Church (Harlem, New York), which influenced many of Harris' pieces.

Additionally, his grandfather had an extensive photograph archive, which can be connected to Harris' later experimentation with photography in his art.

During their youth in the early 1970s, Harris and his brother began to do drag on the weekends, in which they would perform in the hallway of their mother's home.

This provided a safe space for the brothers to experiment with gender and their own personal sexual identity, something they feel is crucial to their artistic development.

In addition to playing with gender and performance, Harris toyed with color and different functions of color.

Growing up in the 1970s, there was a resurgence within the African American community in which exploration of African culture began to influence style and domestic culture.

Harris used color to connect himself and his art back to these roots, as many in his community did at the time of his childhood.

Harris originally decided to attend Wesleyan University with the intended major of Economics.

During his second year there, he took a trip to Amsterdam to visit his brother that was living there at the time.

In Amsterdam, Harris discovered a book by Allan Sekula, “Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works” that he believes drastically altered his ideas of self-development, changing the course of his life.

Harris returned to the US and spent the following semester exploring NYC through the black clubbing scene of the 1980s.

He took courses in the arts, returned to Wesleyan, came out as queer, and switched his major to art.

According to art critic Maximilíano Duron, an emergence of self-realization within Harris sparked his first work titled “Americas” between 1987 and 1988.

“Americas” is a black and white photography series in which Harris dresses in wigs and wears whiteface.

Scholars, Kwame Appiah and Cassandra Coblentz, view “Americas” as Harris’ discovery of both his voice as an artist, and as a man, while toying with blackface in reverse.

Harris went on to attend the California Institute for the Arts and describes facing challenges there as one of the only students of color.

After receiving feedback from a professor that his work was misunderstood by a white audience, he created a piece intended to command attention.

This piece was Harris standing in a leopard bodysuit with a derogatory word referring to homosexuals painted in red lipstick at the bottom.

Harris expresses that he used this piece to claim his identity, and reassume power over it, in a way that everyone could understand.

Harris’ struggle at CalArts inspired his work titled “Constructs”.

Constructs furthered the ideas of his previous work “Americas”, as he aimed to showcase what it means to be a queer black man and accentuated the connection between sexuality and race.

He dressed mainly in minstrel attire and used whiteface to critique the static aspects of culture in the US led by a white majority.

In 1988, Harris graduated from Wesleyan University with a BFA.Harris received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and attended the National Graduate Photography Seminar at the Tisch School of the Arts in 1990.

Following this time, Harris also participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1992.

Harris’ first exhibition-style work was curated in 1992, in a series he created through the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.The collection was a color-based series, in which he used the colors of the Pan-African flag and members of his family to display and create a narrative of black life that was proud and exuberant.

In 1994, Harris was offered a solo exhibition in New York City by Jack Tilton featuring his earlier work, “Constructs”, as part of the larger exhibition titled “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” Educator, Senam Okudzeto, considered Harris’ work a marriage of the autobiographical and the historiographical, beautifully illustrating “identity politics”.

For Okudzeto, “Black Male” did not attempt to project inclusivity or disillusion viewers; “Black Male” encouraged viewers to think about blackness and masculinity as political powers in the culture of the United States.

In the fall of 1994, Harris exhibited The Good Life in New York where Barkley L. Hendricks also appeared, where Elizabeth Hess of The Village Voice said "the most brilliant pairing in the installation is achieved when Lyle Ashton Harris' seductive self-portraits meet Barkley L. Hendricks' tight paintings of black men. Harris dresses up in feminine costumes, challenging every construct of black macho, while Hendricks' dated, once fashionable portraits - a sports figure, a man in a fancy, full-length coat - support the pillars of masculinity...".

The show was composed of large format Polaroids depicting staged and impromptu photographs of friends and family members.

One of the most notable works from the show is a triptych series in collaboration with his brother, Thomas Allen Harris, entitled "Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etcetera".

The work weaves a complex visual allegory that invokes ancient African cosmologies, Judeo-Christian myths, and taboo public and private desires.

Harris remained consistent in his ability to play with gender, sexuality and race in his art when he worked with Renée Cox in 1994.

The two posed for Harris's polaroid piece, The Child.