Portrait of Zanele Muholi and Lyle Ashton Harris taken at Black Portraiture[s]: The Black Body in the West, Musée du quai Branly, Paris, 2013. Photo by Awam Amkpa.

Tubatsi Mpho Moloi has been performing with Lerato Lichaba since 2013. He is a sensational vocalist and multi‐instumentalist playing mainly the Flute and Rhythym Guitar since 2005. Previously, he has been touring the world on a musical production called Umoja where he was also acting and dancing.

I wanted to share some recent work in publication:

New York Magazine
Bomb Magazine
Artforum

Wishing you a pleasant summer.

Lyle

LYLE ASHTON HARRIS | EKTACHROME ARCHIVE 1986-96: PART I – RECOVERING IDENTITY AND DESIRE

Exhibition

April 10 – May 30, 2015

Talk by Dr. Alpesh K. Patel, Ph.D.
Followed by Q&A, Dr. Patel & Lyle Ashton Harris
Friday, April 10th, 7 PM
Opening reception Friday, April 10th, 8-10 PM

David Castillo Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition by Lyle Ashton Harris, Ektachrome Archive 1986-96: Part I – Recovering Identity and Desire.

Shown for the first time, this exhibition of thirty-four chromogenic prints selected from the artist’s personal archive of 35mm Ektachrome color reversal slides represents a unique document of ephemeral moments and emblematic figures shot in the 1980s and 1990s against a backdrop of seismic shifts in the art world, the emergence of multiculturalism, the second wave of AIDS activism, and incipient globalization.

Poignantly evoking a time when the contemporary art scene, the black community and the gay community were becoming increasingly imbricated, these candid images reveal the spontaneous gaze of a young artist sensitive to the power of the photographic medium to memorialize life’s transiency, long before the invention of the selfie.

With unassuming candor, this selection of works portrays a close circle of the artist’s friends, acquaintances and lovers, including many notable luminaries then on the cusp of ascendency, such as the photographers Nan Goldin and Catherine Opie, artists Glenn Ligon and Renée Cox, MoMA curatorKlaus Biesenbach, writers bell hooks and Essex Hemphill, filmmakers Isaac Julian, John Akomfrah,and the artist’s brother, Thomas Allen Harris. Punctuated by uncontrived self-portraits and intimate still lifes, the artist’s disarming images span encounters in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Martha’s Vineyard, London, Berlin, Rome and Venice to offer reminiscent glimpses that foreshadow the blurring of one’s public and private life in contemporary cyberculture.

As Charlotte Cotton, critic and former curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) as well as the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photographs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, writes in The Photograph as Contemporary Art (World of Art): “Harris makes a map of visual and ideological connections . . . blending high criticality and personal narrative to suggest that all photography inherently carries representational meaning beyond the intent or making of the photographer.”

The photographs in this exhibition serve not only to memorialize, but also to reactivate lived moments at the intersection of the personal and the political, through the prism of self-reflexive documentation by a mature artist, re-engaging time past to actively impact the present.

Culled from the artist’s archive of hundreds of color slides originally shot using Ektachrome film (which Kodak discontinued in 2013), Harris initially presented selections from his archive publicly as digital projections at Yale University, as well as in conjunction with the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2013-14. A subsequent presentation of archive selections as projected images with accompanying musical mash-up took place at the Guggenheim Museum’s “Past Tense/Future Perfect” performative event, produced to accompany the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of World AIDS Day, a digital video version of selections of Harris’s archive was commissioned by Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art in2014 (available for viewing online at https://vimeo.com/112420518).

For almost three decades Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice, ranging from photographic media, collage, installation and performance, to explore the impact of desire, ethnicity, and gender in the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. Known for his self-portraits and use of pop culture icons (such as Billie Holiday and Michael Jackson), Harris teases viewers’ perceptions and expectations, resignifying cultural cursors, and recalibrating the familiar with the extraordinary. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 52nd Venice Biennale, and is in collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA, Los Angeles), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC). His commissioned work has been featured in an extensive range of publications, including The New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker and, most recently, Aperture. Born in the Bronx, New York, Harris spent his formative years in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, and studied at Wesleyan University, the California Institute of the Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He is currently an Associate Professor at New York University and serves on the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome, for which he will be co-curating with Robert Storr and Peter Benson Miller a group exhibition titled Nero su Bianco, opening May 2015.

RECENT ACQUISITIONS: THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Exhibition

The Watering Hole, 1996, Duraflex prints, Nine 30×40″ panels

American Photography: Recent Acquisitions from The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Organized by Quentin Bajac, The Joel and Anne Ehrenkanz Chief Curator, and Sarah Meister, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Museum of Modern Art has been collecting photographs since the early 1930s. Even before establishing an independent Department of Photography (in December 1940) the Museum had amassed an impressive array of photographs, made by some of the medium’s leading practitioners: Walker Evans, Edward Weston, László Moholy-Nagy, to name but a few. Since then, the Museum has built a collection that reflects the richness and vitality of photography’s creative traditions from the inception of photography to the present day.

Recent strategic reviews of collecting priorities have focused these efforts and the photographs on view—all acquired since 2013—represent the results of several of these initiatives. With an attentiveness to post-war “American” achievements in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the pursuit of key achievements in depth (William Klein, Geraldo de Barros, Susan Meiselas), conceptual practices (Regina Silveira, Liliana Porter, Sarah Charlesworth), works that address questions of gender and identity (Lyle Ashton Harris, Mark Morrisroe, Oscar Munoz), and contemporary trends (Collier Schorr, Lisa Oppenheim) : these are some of the Department’s current goals that are presented here.

The RECENT ACQUISITIONS exhibition is presented on the 1st floor in the Salon d’Honneur at the Grand Palais.

LYLE ASHTON HARRIS

Tuesday October 21th 2014

INVITATION

18h00 Opening
19h30 Artist Talk
20h00 Drinks and Food

On Invitation Only

If you will attend, please reply to:
desk@maruani-mercier.com

Location

Rue de la Régence 17 – B-1000 Brussels

Maruani & Mercier Gallery has the pleasure of announcing the opening of an exhibition by
New York-based artist Lyle Ashton Harris, on display through November 2014.

Harris presents a selection of photo-based works in various media spanning two decades, reflecting his ongoing engagement at multiple intersections of difference and desire, the personal and the political. Deploying photography, collage, photomontage as well as the incorporation of material and digital “ready-mades,” Harris’s artworks seduce viewers into an expanded dialogue with images punctuated by complex, often ambivalent affects to problematize our understanding, affording a sense of immediacy and visual accessibility to contemporary concerns that arise from the unfolding event of globalization and its mediatization.

Describing Harris’s work in 2010 as “a knotty fusion of seductive beauty and sharp sociopolitical observation,” New York Times art critic Holland Cotter observed that “[Harris] deftly layers his data, leaving us to connect the dots. And as relatively few American artists do, he pulls contemporary Africa, firsthand, into the big global picture, partly by pointing up a big global problem it shares with the rest of the world,” concluding, “Harris neither pulls his political punches here nor forces easy conclusions.”

Harris’s seminal series, The Watering Hole (1996), a nine-panel assembly of photomontages that juxtapose highly mediated images with affectively charged artifacts drawn from the artist’s personal archive, features prominently as a conceptual centerpiece of the exhibition, exemplifying themes and motifs that have been recurrent throughout the artist’s work over the years. Concerned with a multiplicity of troubling affects that emerged through media revelations of the serial killings perpetrated by Jeffrey Dahmer, this series was considered highly controversial when first exhibited. Commenting in the exhibition catalogue, which contains an interview with Harris, fellow artist Peter Halley suggests that this work conveys a “fierce energy” that he sees running throughout Harris’s entire oeuvre. This distinctive sensibility expresses itself across the range of more recent works presented in the exhibition.

In the Jamestown Prison Erasure Images (2010), Harris presents moments of decollage in photographs that document the found remnants of deteriorating wall collages left behind by prisoners recently housed in a seventeenth century fort, a structure originally used by successive European traders and colonizers to house enslaved Africans. Evocative of the desires of those formerly incarcerated, the images convey a raw and contemporary quality, deteriorating as a result of their creator’s absence.

In Deceivers and Money Boys (2013), Harris employs trompe l’oeil to effect a slippage between the digital and the material, conjuring the presence of an ambivalent semiosis that emerges against what appears to be a web page intended to inform travelers about the dangers of sex tourism. Images of men seductively staging themselves on the internet through bodily gestures that exemplify codes of gay iconography serve to problematize sexuality as a virtual multiplicity, visualized as a liminal space that confronts viewers with their complicity in looking.

In Christian Village (2014), Harris makes a sparse gestural statement, a critique comprised of obliquely puzzling elements, the mystery of which defies any superficial discursive reading. Frenetic markings register the trauma of an event (a time and place of draconian laws against gay people in Africa), configured in contrast to the banality of sympathy card, a solitary “ready-made,” memorializing the ineffable experience of loss and grief.

Expanding on related themes, several other new photo-based works in the exhibition utilize diverse media, as well as effects of scale and magnification, to engage viewers with textured, often grainy reconfigurations of desire that layer and enfold image and text, embodying complex conflations of the personal and the political.

For more than two decades Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photographic media and collage to installation and performance. His work explores the meetings of the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender and desire on contemporary social and cultural dynamics. Known for his self-portraits and use of pop culture icons such as Billie Holiday and Michael Jackson, His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the 52nd Venice Biennale. The High Museum of Art in Atlanta recently named Harris the 10th recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize. His work has been acquired by major international museums, including The Watering Hole most recently by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His commissioned work has been featured in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker. In 2014 Harris joined the board of trustees of the American Academy in Rome. Born in New York City, Harris spent his formative years in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. He received his Bachelor of Arts with Honors from Wesleyan University in 1988 and a Masters in Fine Arts form the California Institute of the Arts in 1990. He currently lives and works in New York City and is an Associate Professor at New York University.

Catalogue available at the gallery soon!

HIGH MUSEUM OF ART NAMES LYLE ASHTON HARRIS 2014
RECIPIENT OF DAVID C. DRISKELL PRIZE

ATLANTA, Feb. 20, 2014 – The High Museum of Art today named artist Lyle Ashton Harris the 2014 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the prize, which the High established in 2005 as the first national award to honor and celebrate contributions to the field of African American art and art history. For more than two decades, Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photographic media and collage to installation and performance. 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.

Known for his self-portraits and use of pop culture icons (such as Billie Holiday and Michael Jackson), Harris teases the viewers’ perceptions and expectations, recalibrating the familiar with the extraordinary. Harris’ works were previously on view in the Atlanta metro area in his spring 2013 exhibition “Accra My Love” at Kennesaw State University’s Zuckerman Museum of Art.

As the 10th Driskell Prize recipient, Harris will be honored at the Driskell Prize Dinner in Atlanta on May 2, 2014 at 6:30 p.m.

“Lyle Ashton Harris’ award-winning artwork has been widely celebrated with exhibitions, commissions and acquisitions,” said Michael E. Shapiro, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr. director of the High. “His work tackles issues of global and personal relevance, and it is only fitting that we recognize his artistic excellence on the 10th anniversary of the David C. Driskell Prize.”

The Driskell Prize, named for the renowned African-American artist and art scholar, recognizes an early or mid-career scholar or artist whose work makes an original and important contribution to the field of African-American art or art history. In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the award, the High is currently presenting the exhibition “A Decade of David C. Driskell,” which showcases works by Driskell as well as works by Driskell Prize honorees and others acquired by the Museum with the David C. Driskell African American Art Acquisitions Fund and the David C. Driskell African American Art Endowment.

The selection process for the 2014 recipient of the Driskell Prize began with a call for nominations from a national pool of artists, curators, teachers, collectors and art historians. Harris was chosen from these nominations by review committee members assembled by the High Museum of Art, which this year included Michael Rooks, the High’s Wieland Family curator of modern and contemporary art; Naomi Beckwith, Marilyn and Larry Fields curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, 2013 Driskell Prize recipient and director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.

The 2014 Driskell Prize Dinner is co-chaired by Lovette Russell and Jack Sawyer with Honorary Chair F. Terry Stent. Tickets for the black-tie event can be purchased by contacting Rhonda Matheison at rhonda.matheison@woodruffcenter.org or 404-733-4403.

About Lyle Ashton Harris 

Based in New York City, Harris is an associate professor at New York University and has exhibited his work internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Harris’ work has been acquired by major international museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among many others. His commissioned work has been featured in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.

Born in New York City, Harris spent his formative years in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. He received his bachelor of arts with honors from Wesleyan University in 1988 and a masters in fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 1990. He recently joined the board of trustees of the American Academy in Rome.

Harris is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the 2009 Goddard Award, the 2009 American Photography Award, the 2001 Rome Prize Fellowship, and the 1991 National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowship for the Visual Arts, among others.

About the David C. Driskell Prize

Established by the High in 2005, the David C. Driskell Prize is the first national award to honor and celebrate contributions to the field of African American art and art history. Past recipients include Andrea Barnwell Brownlee (2013), Rashid Johnson (2012), Valerie Cassel Oliver (2011), Renee Stout (2010), Krista A. Thompson (2009), Xaviera Simmons (2008), Franklin Sirmans (2007), Willie Cole (2006) and Dr. Kellie Jones (2005). A cash award of $25,000 accompanies the prize. Proceeds from the High’s annual Driskell Prize Dinner go toward both the David C. Driskell African American Art Acquisitions Fund and the David C. Driskell African American Art Endowment. Through the David C. Driskell African American Art Acquisitions Fund, the High acquired works by artists including Rashid Johnson, Radcliffe Bailey, Nick Cave, Willie Cole, John T. Scott and Renee Stout.

About David C. Driskell

David Driskell is a practicing artist and scholar whose work on the African Diaspora spans more than four decades. The High’s relationship with Driskell began in 2000, when the Museum presented the concurrent exhibitions “To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities” and “Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection,” which examined African American art in the broad historical context of modern and contemporary art. Born in 1931 in Eatonton, Ga., Driskell is distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his bachelor of arts degree from Howard University in 1955 and his master of fine arts degree from Catholic University in 1962. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1953 and studied art history in The Hague, the Netherlands, in 1964. More information about Driskell is available at www.driskellcenter.umd.edu.

About the High Museum of Art

Founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association, the High Museum of Art is the leading art museum in the Southeastern U.S. With more than 14,000 works of art in its permanent collection, the High has an extensive anthology of 19th- and 20th-century American and decorative art; significant holdings of European paintings; a growing collection of African American art; and burgeoning collections of modern and contemporary art, photography, folk art and African art. For more information visit www.High.org.

About The Woodruff Arts Center

The Woodruff Arts Center is ranked among the top four arts centers in the nation. The Woodruff is unique in that it combines four visual and performing arts divisions on one campus as one not-for-profit organization. Opened in 1968, the Woodruff Arts Center is home to the Alliance Theatre, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the High Museum of Art and Young Audiences. To learn more visit www.WoodruffCenter.org.

# # #

For more information, please contact:  Marci TateManager of Public Relationsmarci.tate@woodruffcenter.org404-733-4585

Jessica Joris Public Relations Specialist jessica.joris@woodruffcenter.org404-733-4423

Work Included in Upcoming Group Exhibitions at Metro Pictures and LACMA

Dear friends,

I trust 2014 is treating you well thus far. I hope you get a chance to see the below two group exhibitions which feature my work.

Untitled (Erasure), 2010, 14” x 20 5/8”, Edition 1/12
Collection of Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins
C-Print mounted on Dibond

Metro Pictures presents Bad Conscience, an exhibition organized by artist and writer John Miller that features a multigenerational group of artists with whom Miller has collaborated in the past or maintains regular dialogue. The paintings, photographs and moving images included in the exhibition elicit a disquieting effect that Miller attributes to a troubled process of representation.

Other artists include Cara Benedetto, Caleb Considine, Jane Dickson, Dan Graham, Nic Guagnini, Takuji Kogo and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Leigh Ledare, Frank Lutz, Marilyn Minter, Wangechi Mutu, Greg Parma Smith, Walter Robinson, Aura Rosenberg and Matthew Watson.

Opening Reception Thursday, January 16, 2014, 6-8 PM. On view through February 22, 2014.

http://www.metropicturesgallery.com/exhibitions/2014-01-16_bad-conscience/

Verona #2, 2001, 20” x 16”, Edition 4/10
Black and white silver gelatin print
Collection of Robert Holmes

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents Fútbol: The Beautiful Game, an exhibition curated by Franklin Sirmans. Celebrating the sport on the eve of the 2013 World Cup in Brazil, the exhibition includes approximately thirty artists from around the world, working in video, photography, painting and sculpture, exploring issues of nationalism and identity, globalism and mass spectacle, as well as the common human experience shared by spectators from many cultures.

On view February 2, 2014 through July 20, 2014.

http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/futbol-beautiful-game

Cheers
Lyle

MoMA Acquires “The Watering Hole” Series

Dear Friends,

I am delighted to share with you that the Museum of Modern Art has just acquired The Watering Hole (1996), a suite of nine 30 x 40“ photomontages.

These works were featured by CRG Gallery at Miami Basel last December 2012. Though individual works from this series have been included in several international group exhibitions, this was the first time these works have been exhibited in their entirety since their premiere at Jack Tilton Gallery in 1996.

To provide some context for this work, here is a selection of articles and reviews on this series:

Lewis, Sarah. “Incendiary Acts.” Lyle Ashton Harris: Blow Up. New York, NY: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2008. 93-103. Print.

Smith, Roberta. “Lyle Ashton Harris.” Review of “The Watering Hole” exhibition. The New York Times 27 Sept. 1996: C29. Print.

Woolery, Reggie. “The Watering Hole.” Review of “The Watering Hole” exhibition. Fuse Magazine 20.3 (June 1997): 37-9. Print.

It has become increasingly clear how central this work is to my overall practice and oeuvre, combining self-portraiture, collage, the personal and the political, as well as engaging with the medium of photography in ways that I continue to explore and expand upon in my latest work.

Many thanks to Aggie Gund, Roxana Marcoci, Glenn Lowry and CRG Gallery for their combined efforts in making this possible.

I greatly appreciate your interest in and support of my work over the years.

Warm regards
Lyle

Thomas J. Lax in conversation with Lyle Ashton Harris

Untitled (Lyle and Caravaggio), London, 1992

Wednesday November 6, 2013
6:30pm
NYU Barney Building, Einstein Auditorium
34 Stuyvesant Street (between 3^rd Ave. and 9^th St.).

Free of charge, no reservations. Seating is limited.
Photo ID required for entrance to NYU buildings.

The event is offered in conjunction with the exhibition, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Part I on view at the NYU Grey Art Gallery from September 10 through December 7, 2013 and Part II on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem from November 14, 2013 through March 9, 2014.