Two collages of objects such as letters, newspapers, and archival images are treated with blue and green overlays and placed atop a patterned textile.

Lyle Ashton Harris

b. 1965

Born in The Bronx, New York in 1965, lives and works in New York, New York

My works speak to the multiplicity of locations I occupy. I utilize self-portraiture as a tool for embodiment, to reimagine the self while looking at the past, to meditate on the present as a way to conceptualize the future and rethink our understanding of identity. — Lyle Ashton Harris, 2021

Artwork

Exhibitions

02.09.2023–09.22.2024
Our first and last love
Nasher Museum of Art, Rose Art Museum, Queens Museum

Lyle Ashton Harris

09.20–09.26.2021
Blow Up (Verso), 2010-19
Art Basel

Lyle Ashton Harris

09.09.2018–01.12.2019
Flash of the Spirit
Salon 94 Bowery

Lyle Ashton Harris

05.19–06.26.2020
Group Show
Online

Portraiture: A Private Room

Biography

Lyle Ashton Harris, Zamble (Clermont), 2018

Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic.

Harris has been widely exhibited internationally, including his major solo exhibition Our first and last love, Nasher Museum of Art,Durham, NC, which traveled to Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA, and Queens Museum, NY (2023-24), and in the group exhibitions This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2024-25), Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility, Guggenheim, New York (2023), and Performer and Participant: Performing Genders, Performing Selves, Tate Modern, London, UK (2023). Harris’s work was included in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), the Busan Biennial, South Korea (2008), the Bienal de São Paulo (2016), the Whitney Biennial (2017), and presented by Cinéma Du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018).

Harris is represented in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annendale-on-Hudson, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate, London, UK; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland, among others.

Harris has also presented performances at a range of venues, most recently at Volksbühne Grüner Salon sponsored by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2019); a lecture/performance on Andy Warhol presented by the DIA Art Foundation, New York (2018); and an installation/performance at Participant Inc., New York (2018); and a lecture/performance on experimentation, politics and sexuality in the work of filmmaker Marlon T. Riggs at Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver BC, Canada (2020).

Harris received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2016), the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2014), and the Rome Prize Fellowship (2000) among other awards and honors. Harris joined the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome in 2014 and was appointed a trustee of the Tiffany Foundation in 2016.

Born in the Bronx, New York, raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and New York, Harris obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University, a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Harris is a Professor of Art at New York University and lives in New York.

CV

Press

07.18.2024
Photographer Lyle Ashton Harris On Costumes, Contemporary Africa and the Cardinality of Self Love
Dan Duray

Observer

06.08.2024
Lyle Ashton Harris's Scrapbook of the Self
Vince Aletti

The New Yorker

06.07.2024
A Photographer Widens His Gaze to Loss, and It’s a Gain
Holland Cotter

The New York Times

06.03.2024
Lyle Ashton Harris: Our First and Last Love | Queens Museum
Aundréa Verdi

Musée Magazine

05.30.2024
June 2024 exhibitions: Art shows to leave the house for this month
Ashleigh Kane

Dazed

05.20.2024
“What Does It Mean to Have Survived?”: Lyle Ashton Harris, in Conversation With Ryan McGinley
Ryan McGinley

Interview Magazine

08.30.2021
From Manet paintings to Zidane photographs, artist Lyle Ashton Harris samples images to create a language of his own
Kristian Vistrup Madsen

Art Basel

01.08.2021
A trove of old Ektachrome slides shows artists, friends and lovers in the 1980s and '90s
Jacqui Palumbo

CNN Style

09.16.2020
Lyle Ashton Harris's "Ektachrome Archive"
Unknown

CNN Style

06.12.2020
5 artists tell us the hardships—and benefits—of creating in isolation
Ann Binlot

Document Journal

06.01.2020
LYLE ASHTON HARRIS with McKenzie Wark
McKenzie Wark

Brooklyn Rail

01.07.2020
Lyle Ashton Harris on Self-Portraiture and Making Man and Woman #1, 1987
Caitlin Shamberg

Getty

01.01.2020
Lyle Ashton Harris
Andrea Blanch

Musee Magazine

04.02.2019
Out Side In: In His Arresting Work, Lyle Ashton Harris Looks to the Recent Past for New Ways Forward
Maximilíano Durón

ARTnews

12.18.2018
Diasporic Notions: Lyle Ashton Harris Interviewed by Katy Diamond Hamer
Katy Diamond Hamer

Bomb Magazine

12.12.2018
The Hallucinatory Reclamations of Lyle Ashton Harris’s Masked Self-Portraits
Andrea K. Scott

The New Yorker

02.08.2018
The artist who explored ethnicity, gender, & desire in 90s America
Miss Rosen

Dazed Digital