JTF (just the facts): A retrospective exhibition, hung against white and black walls, in a series of three connected spaces (and their exterior walls) on the museum’s main floor. The exhibit was curated by Lauren Haynes and Caitlin Julia Rubin. (Installation shots below.)
The following works are included in the exhibit:
- 5 gelatin silver prints, 1987
- 1 set of 3 gelatin silver prints, 1987-1988
- 2 Duraflex prints, 1990, 1996
- 1 mixed media installation, 1990
- 3 vitrines of artist’s ephemera, 1961-2001
- 1 chromogenic print, 1992
- 1 ruby red neon, 1993
- 4 Polaroid prints, 1994, 2002, 2002/2021
- 1 Polaroid print (with Renee Cox), 1994
- 1 chromogenic print and gold leaf paint, 1996
- 1 Cibachrome print, 1998
- 4 dye sublimation prints on aluminum, 1998, 2018, 2021
- 2 archival pigment prints, 2000, 2014
- 1 set of 2 Polaroid prints, 2002
- 2 sets of 3 gelatin silver prints, 2007/2023
- 1 installation of video projection on pigment prints silk organza, 2008, color, sound, 8 minutes 45 seconds
- 1 pigment print on canvas, 2013
- 1 two-channel video, early 1990s/2016, color, sound, 77 minutes
- 1 mixed media collage on panel, 2017
- 12 one/two dye sublimation prints, Ghanaian fabric/Kente cloth, artist’s ephemera, acrylic/spray paint, 2017, 2019, 2020
This exhibition is part of a three-venue tour, with the Queens Museum as the last stop. Previous shows took place at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in early 2023 (here) and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University later in 2023/early 2024 (here)
A catalog of the touring exhibition has been co-published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. (here), the Rose Art Museum, and the Queens Museum (also here). Clothbound hardcover, 10 x 11.5 inches, 168 pages, with 100 color reproductions. Includes a foreword by Gannit Ankori and Sally Tallant, essays by Nana Adusei-Poku, Roderick A. Ferguson, and Ariel Goldberg, and a conversation with the artist led by Lauren Haynes and Caitlin Julia Rubin. (Cover shot below.)
Comments/Context: There is a natural tendency when putting together a mid-career retrospective to check off the best known or “most important” bodies of work in straightforward chronological order, simplifying and summarizing the artist’s story down to its most easily communicated essentials. And while this approach can often be clarifying, it inherently smooths over the messiness of being a human being making art over the period of several decades of growth and living. Great artists make singular bodies of work to be sure, but they also have their own intimate interests, vulnerabilities, joys, and fears, and are surrounded by families, relationships, loves, and other backstories that are all part of their larger artistic evolution.
This very personal journey thrums through Lyle Ashton Harris’s retrospective at the Queens Museum – to wander its rooms filled with nearly forty years of his art is to tag along on a sometimes raw autobiographical process of self-definition and discovery. But what becomes clear quite quickly is that Harris’s journey hasn’t been a linear from-here-to-there kind of story, but instead one of almost spiraling refrains and repetitions, where ideas, themes, images, and identities emerge and then are actively reprocessed again and again across the passing years. And so curatorially, this show doesn’t offer a beginning-to-end straight line narrative, but an intermingled, reworked, reconsidered, and recontextualized set of artistic and personal insights that we see Harris wrestle with over time.
One way to think about this exhibition is that is essentially inverted, using Harris’s most recent body of work as a structural and conceptual scaffolding on which to hang almost everything that came before. His “Shadow Works” liberally draw on archival materials that he has gathered and accumulated across his artistic life, making connections and collapsing time in ways that tie his whole career together. Made across a period of roughly four years (from 2017 though 2020), the “Shadow Works” share a common compositional framework – each is made up of dye sublimation prints on shiny color-tinted aluminum, surrounded by and matted together with patterned Ghanaian fabrics, in some cases with additional spray painted stencils or resonant objects (including snippets of the artist’s own hair) affixed on top. The photographs capture precise arrangements of images and other ephemera as seen on Harris’s studio walls, and the fabrics were acquired during Harris’s time living in Ghana.
Many artists intentionally make mood boards, or simply gather up images that speak to them for one reason or another and tack them up on nearby walls for appreciation or inspiration. But on this score, Harris is another kind of animal entirely – he’s a passionate collector, a saver, an archivist, a journal keeper, a note taker, and a witness, who has been packing away resonant stuff (including his own photographs) since his undergraduate days. What’s important to understand is that this multivalent collecting process isn’t a tangential side activity, but a central avenue to making artistic sense of the world around him. And the “Shadow Works” aren’t remotely the beginning of this process of iterative collecting and collaging – the show also includes an edited version of Harris’s 1990 MFA thesis work “The Secret Life of a Snow Queen” that he made at CalArts, where the looseness, intimacy, and immediacy found in images of friends and lovers brought fresh personal closeness to an intellectual program steeped in artistic theory.
As seen in a series of vitrines staged in the middle of the show, Harris has consistently remixed and reinterpreted his own archive. Postcards, Polaroids, and gallery announcements are freely intermingled with school portraits, annotated Post-It notes, family images, and a dizzying array of less identifiable outtakes and imagery; there’s even an envelope marked “Boyfriends + Obsessions” whose contents remain tantalizing unseen. One journal page is opened to a spread where Harris taped two fortune cookie fortunes, and as I perused the vitrines, the one that said “Our first and last love is…Self-love.” caught my eye. I took a picture of it (see above), not entirely realizing that it was the source for the exhibition title – as an aphorism or motto, it seemed just so appropriate to Harris’s own journey. And in fact, a turn through the gallery then leads to a 1993 work in red neon which reproduces the phrase again; perhaps if I had known about this chain of ideas prior to visiting the show, it would have felt expected or obvious, but in my particular experience, discovering this progression for myself felt like secret magic, or the world giving Harris a confirming sign that he really was on the right track all along.
But as a queer Black man in America, out since his undergraduate days, the world hasn’t always been so welcoming, and the traumas (large and small) of his life, his search for identity, the cultural, political, and social constraints he felt, and his longings for love and acceptance all feature prominently in his work. The path to self-love started with performative self-portraiture, where Harris played roles, tried on personas, and pushed boundaries. His early black-and-white images (from the late 1980s) have aged extremely well and remain undeniably powerful; his androgynous minstrel whiteface persona, nude and wearing a white wig, alternately draped in the American flag and feminine gossamer tulle, is simultaneously fragile and boldly provocative, taking direct aim at the white gaze objectification of Black men by the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and others at the time. These images were followed in the 1990s by standout self-portraits in a police uniform and red lipstick (titled “Saint Michael Stewart”, after a young Black artist who died in police custody) and fully nude with his older brother, mixing a kiss with a gun pointed at his chest. A decade later, he knocked us out with a confrontational self-portrait in handcuffs, and he has continued in the years since to extend his persona in various directions – as just a torso reflected in an ornate mirror, in feminine Billie Holiday blue (with a delicate floral headpiece), and more recently posed in a range of African masks (here). Many of these images have become touchstones, swirling race, gender, sexuality, and politics into a brashly combustible stew.
But for all the flamboyant theatricality that is expressed in these inhabited self-portraits, Harris still feels to me very much an actively curious, often introspective, and wide-ranging artistic African American intellectual. Spend a few minutes listening to him talk on the phone back in the 1990s (as seen in a video presentation from 2016) and it’s clear that even as a young man, he was a sharp and compassionate thinker, well aware of the forces surrounding him. All throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Harris steeped himself in Black intellectual culture, mixing with writers, historians, artists, academics, and activists, and attending conferences, talks, protests, and other more informal gatherings and parties where he made a nearly constant stream of casual photographs. These color slides ultimately took shape as the “Ektachrome Archive,” some 3500 images that stayed in storage while Harris was teaching in Ghana and have since resurfaced both as a slideshow artwork in and of itself (not on view in this retrospective) and as yet another source of archival material for Harris’s ongoing collage efforts. For those (like myself) who are only able to recognize and identify some of the faces in these pictures, and are therefore missing out on some of the intellectual connections and resonances Harris is drawing on, there is still a rich sense of collaboration and community to be found, now tinged with a sense of nostalgia and loss amplified by the passing years.
This brings us all the way back around to the “Shadow Works”, which knit this survey together. With Harris now in his late 50s, his archives of images and ephemera have become both more expansive and more filled with quiet melancholy, and the resulting studio wall assemblages that he has then rephotographed for the “Shadow Works” channel that restless, rumbled feeling of ongoing self-excavation and examination. Without the careful annotations found in the exhibit catalog (which meticulously detail each and every subimage and piece of ephemera included in the project), the “Shadow Works” can feel a bit impenetrable, pushing us back to more formal readings of the patterns, repetitions, and visual echoes they contain. But even without all the background info, visual themes of family and legacy (both artistic and cultural), of differing definitions of queer masculinity, of belonging and not belonging, of the intermingled charge of desire and violence, and of lost moments of tenderness each come through in the various individual works. Seen as a group, and with the funeral association of many of the Ghanaian fabrics, the layered arrangements feel richly meditative and often recalibrated by sorrow, struggle, and unsettled memory, the archive of Harris’s own history reshuffled once again for a different contemporary moment.
What I like best about this retrospective is that it resists the idea that the tensions, conflicts, and even contradictions found in Harris’s work can be neatly resolved and tied up into a neat package for us to consume as museum visitors. Instead, it presents artworks that feel consistently risky and uneasy, but that are supported by a richness of thinking and emotional intelligence that gives those risks context and meaning – there is a measured logic to be decoded in nearly every picture or collage, even when its content touches on some of the artist’s rawest and most vulnerable feelings and histories. I came away understanding that it is this fullness of intellect and commitment to care that are the real foundation that lies underneath Harris’s robust influence on the generations of artists that have followed him; he has attentively and honestly continued to question (and reshape) different facets of his own identity for his entire artistic career, and that kind of sustained dedication is contagiously inspiring.
Collector’s POV: Lyle Ashton Harris is represented by Salon 94 in New York (here), David Castillo Gallery in Miami (here), and Maruani Mercier in Brussels (here). His work has little consistent secondary market history, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.