Carole Harris

Carole Harris (born 1943) is an African American designer, and fiber and textile artist from Detroit, Michigan. Quilting is a key medium for her, which she has adapted to new forms of abstract art. Her art has been influenced by the people, history and the musical legacy of Detroit as well as African textile practice. Her work has been shown in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and Harris has received numerous honors such as the Kresge Arts Fellowship.

Family and early life Carole Harris was born in 1943 at Wayne Diagnostic Hospital, a Black hospital in then-segregated Detroit, Michigan, during the summer of the 1943 Detroit riots. Harris was born two months prematurely at only 2 pounds, and spent extended time in the hospital as a result. Her mother had to take public transportation across the rioting to bring breast milk to the hospital for Harris. "That trauma," Harris has said, "was my start to life." She also learned to sew at a very young age, so early that Harris doesn't consciously remember when she started. She made much of her own clothing as a young woman. The first quilt that Harris made used a "pinwheel pattern" design for her wedding to Bill Harris in 1966. Harris started her higher education at Highland Park Junior College (HPJC) and graduated from Wayne State University with a BFA. Bearden especially interested Harris, because he was the first artist she saw depicting Black life almost exclusively in an abstract style, which made it more powerful to her.

Design career Harris did not want to depend on selling her art to make a living for herself, so she worked a "day job" for over 30 years as a commercial designer, specializing in architecture and interiors. She designed for several Detroit firms, including Nathan Johnson and Associates, where she became Director of interior design in 1974. Frustrated at seeing white co-workers advancing faster than her while she worked just as hard, Harris decided to found her own firm, which she called Interior Planning and Design. She began with traditional quilts, but she eventually tired of "the sameness and predictability" of patterning. Her compositions are also architectural, as she pushes the boundaries of quilt construction into three-dimensional space. She has connected her experimental modes of discovery with those of other forms of art invigorated by improvisation: literature, dance, and music, especially jazz. Harris cites music and its concepts of "motion, rhythm, and harmony" as being fundamental to her aesthetic, particularly Black diasporic forms such as jazz, spirituals, and Hip Hop, and the titles of many of her artworks reflect this musical influence. Black is also a key color in Harris's artworks, rearticulated as a "positive space," a resting space akin to a pause in a musical composition, rather than as the "negative space" it is often described as in European-American art traditions.

Themes of artwork One theme throughout Harris's career is the passage of time and its impact on people, materials, and memory. Her methods and compositions work with ideas of decay and aging as well as the impulse and ability to mend and renew. She collect and uses old garments in her work, exploring how colors change, run, and fade as well as the enduring relationships people have with clothes over their lifetimes. In 1992, Harris's work was part of an art exhibition by the Kentucky Quilt Project called Always There: The African-American Presence in American Quilts that presented a history of African American quilting from the time of enslavement to the contemporary moment. This show traveled to 8 more museums across the United States. In 2013, Harris's artwork was featured prominently in an international art show entitled The Sum of Many Parts: 25 Quiltmakers in 21st Century America that travelled to the Guangxi Museum of Nationalities in Nanning, Guangxi, where she guest lectured at the show's opening. Harris was awarded an artistic fellowship from Kresge Arts in Detroit in 2015.