Lyle Ashton Harris

Lyle Ashton Harris (born February 6, 1965) is an American artist who has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photographic media, collage, installation art and performance art. Harris uses his works to comment on societal constructs of sexuality and race, while exploring his own identity as a queer, black man.

Early life Born in the Bronx, Harris was mostly raised by his chemistry professor mother Rudean after she divorced Harris's father, between New York City and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Harris has expressed the impact of the absence of his father as a large impact on his personal and emotional development, which would later be shown through some of his pieces, including his collaborations with his brother, Thomas Allen Harris. While in Dar Es Salaam, Harris and his brother were sent to an English-speaking Swahili school. Harris believed it was important to his development as both an artist and a black man to live in a country in which black people were in positions of power. He valued his time spent in Tanzania, as it was a sharp contrast to the school he attended in New York City.

Harris spent a lot of his childhood with his grandparents, including his maternal grandmother Joella, who he has featured in his art, was a missionary and his grandfather was a treasurer for Greater Bethel AME Church (Harlem, New York), which influenced many of Harris' pieces. Additionally, his grandfather had an extensive photograph archive, which can be connected to Harris' later experimentation with photography in his art. Following this time, Harris also participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1992. Harris went on to attend the California Institute for the Arts and describes facing challenges there as one of the only students of color. After receiving feedback from a professor that his work was misunderstood by a white audience, he created a piece intended to command attention. This piece was Harris standing in a leopard bodysuit with a derogatory word referring to homosexuals painted in red lipstick at the bottom. Harris expresses that he used this piece to claim his identity, and reassume power over it, in a way that everyone could understand. The show was composed of large format Polaroids depicting staged and impromptu photographs of friends and family members. One 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.

Harris remained consistent in his ability to play with gender, sexuality and race in his art when he worked with Renée Cox in 1994. The two posed for Harris's polaroid piece, The Child. Cox poses as a father figure, embracing Harris as the mother figure, who holds a child as they both look into the camera. Harris maintains his color scheme of black, green, red, and yellow, which emphasize his connection to his African roots and culture. "The Watering Hole" was inspired by the criminal case involving Jeffrey Dahmer, a cannibalistic killer who had victims that were majority black and Latino boys. At this time, Harris was interested in black masculinity as it relates to vulnerability. He used newspaper clippings relevant to the case and incorporated his own photographs to create a collage that showed the transparency between men and their masculine identities. Harris found the idea of cannibalism in the case especially interesting as it described the process of one's "desire to consume the other".

Blow Up In 2004, "Blow Up", Harris's first public wall collage was shown at the Rhona Hoffman gallery in Chicago. Harris' work, "Blow Up" is a collage series centered around a piece Harris found in 2001 while he was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. At the time, Harris was interested in racism and power dynamic in European Soccer. He was particularly focused on an image of a black man massaging an Italian soccer player's leg. This image became the focal point of the entire exhibition. Blow Up contains imagery depicting interpretations of race and sex across cultures and history, while illustrating their connectivity.

Other exhibitions 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 in Harlem exhibited some of these portraits, highlighting specific individual subjects.

In 2013, the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University presented Accra My Love, a solo exhibition of 14 works by Harris.

In 2014, he was also featured on the Independent Lens documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People produced by his brother Thomas Allen Harris. In 2000 and 2001, he was a Fellow at American Academy in Rome. In February 2015, he received the 2014 David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art and, later in May, he also spoke at the Contemporary African Art Fair at Pioneer Works Center For Art and Innovation.

Harris also co-curated with Robert Storr and Peter Benson Miller a group exhibition Nero su Bianco (Black on White), which was presented at the American Academy in Rome in 2015.

He has also been exhibited in places such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Venice Biennale, Cornell University, Neil L. and Angelica Rudenstine Gallery, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, University of California at Santa Barbara, Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale and Center for the Arts, University at Buffalo, Andy Warhol Museum and Howard University Department of Art. and magazines such as New York, Vibe and The New York Times (the latter at which he was a photojournalist). Mickalene Thomas cited Harris as an influence of hers while Harris himself cited influences such as Caravaggio, Francis Bacon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Lyle Ashton Harris's work is featured in the permanent collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, in Florida, and it was included in the 2026 group show This is America: Selections from PAMM's Collection, in commemoration of the United States 250 birthday.

Ashton Harris is represented by the Salon 94 in New York City. He currently lives in New York where is the assistant professor of art at New York University and formerly split his time between the New York and Accra, Ghana campuses.

Recent works and critical reception Teaching in Accra, Ghana Through New York University's Global Program, between the years of 2005 and 2012, Harris taught in Accra, Ghana, and created work inspired by the political unrest surrounding visibility for the homosexual community. His works "Deceivers and Money Boys," 2013 and "Untitled (Colonial Law)," 2014, were influenced by the oppression of the homosexual community provoked by the media after British Prime Minister, David Cameron, revoked aid to African Countries with "anti-gay laws". "Flash of the Spirit" was shot in Provincetown, Fire Island, a typically white occupied vacation spot. Jeff Elstone of Vulture magazine reports that Harris did so to ignite the African diaspora in those environments through photographs that connect with the inherent queerness Harris sees in Africanism.

Publications Cassel Oliver, Valerie, et al. Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2013. Ashton Harris, Lyle, et al. Lyle Ashton Harris. Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. in collaboration with CRG Gallery, 2003.