User:Deren26/Lyle Ashton Harris

Lyle Ashton Harris (born 1965) is an American artist who has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photographic media, collage, installation and performance. Known for his self-portraits and usage of pop culture icons, Harris’ work reexamines the ways that the boundaries of ethnicity, desire, and masculinity operate in the broader social and cultural dynamic.

Life and works
Born in the Bronx, Harris was raised between New York City and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. He graduated with a BA from Wesleyan University and received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. In the fall of 1994, Harris exhibited his first solo show “The Good Life” in New York. The show was composed of large format Polaroids depicting staged and impromptu photographs of friends and 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. Collage has remained an integral part of Harris’s studio practice since the mid-1990s. In 1996, “The Watering Hole”, a photomontage series, reveals his performative use of photography and its mechanisms, putting image into a field of representation where they reveal hidden or repressed occurrences. In 2004, “Blow Up”, Harris’s first public wall collage was shown at the Rhona Hoffman gallery in Chicago. This lead to a series of three other wall collages composed of materials, photographs and ephemera Harris collected including, Blow UP IV( Sevilla) which was made for the Bienal de Arte Contemporeano de Sevilla in Seville, Spain in 2006.

In 2010 Gregory R. Miller & Co. published Excessive Exposure. The publication is the most definitive documentation of Harris’ “Chocolate-Colored” portraits made with a large-format Polaroid camera over the past ten years. In 2011, the Studio Museum of Harlem exhibited some of these portraits, highlighting specific individual sitters.

Lyle Ashton Harris is represented by CRG gallery in New York City. He currently divides his time between his home and studio in New York and Accra, Ghana.