Lyle Ashton Harris:

On Oracle unfolds from a single artwork, Oracle, but also from a much larger accumulation of images, encounters, archives, friendships, losses, and returns. The performance grows out of my ongoing Shadow Works series, assemblages that revisit montage as a way of thinking through memory, relation, and lived experience. In these works, photographs, fabric, text, and personal ephemera come together to create visual conversations. I’ve always been interested in montage, not only as a formal strategy, but also as a way of understanding the world, where images, objects, and gestures exist in complex interrelationships.

My practice has long been shaped by an archival impulse inherited in part from my grandfather, Albert Sidney Johnson Jr., who spent more than fifty years amassing an extraordinary visual record of family, friends, and community life through thousands of Ektachrome slides as well as 8mm films. In documenting my past, his images offer a familiar touchstone, and, when juxtaposed with my photographs, serve to evoke the passage of time. For me, the archive offers a way to resuscitate memory and reclaim intimacy. Following the death of my father in 2018, I became especially drawn to the images, letters, and mementos of what had been our uneasy relationship, which took on new resonance.

The elements that comprise Oracle bring together multiple chapters of my life. There are photographs made during my years living in Ghana, including images of my close friend Prince, whom I first met in Accra in 2005 and whose presence has continued to move through my work ever since. There are self-portraits, found objects, fragments of text, and materials gathered across continents and decades. The work is grounded in care for images and memory, for those who came before us, and for the fragile forms of intimacy that allow us to remain connected across time.

For my presentation in Aspen Art Museum’s AIR program, Oracle serves as the inspiration for what I consider a “performative montage.” Along with my collaborators Darnell L. Moore and Raymond Pinto, I’m interested in activating the work’s many layers as a living archive, allowing its images and associations to unfold through spoken word, visual projections, movement, and embodied presence. Together we move through the slippages between the personal and the political, private memory and public history, documentation and imagination, creating a space where multiple histories can coexist and where the work of care and collective remembering unfolds in real time.

Raymond Pinto:

The collaboration with Lyle and Darnell feels antecedent to any formal point of origin. I encountered Lyle’s work long before we entered into dialogue as collaborators. Works such as Billie Dreaming in Blue (2021) and the Chocolate Portraits (1998–2008) depict a practice in which portraiture becomes an act of assembly, bringing together material, lived experience, and embodied history without collapsing their differences. Through chromatic intensity and layered surfaces, Lyle’s work produces images that exceed representation, opening onto broader social, cultural, and affective formations. That visual and conceptual framework has remained foundational to the development of my own artistic practice.

What compels me about creating performance in relation to Oracle is the way it unsettles any stable understanding of time. It moves between image and record, gesture and recollection, allowing meaning to emerge through accumulation rather than resolution. There is a painterly density to Lyle’s practice that allows an image to remain precise and yet provisional. Affect accumulates within these encounters, allowing desire and remembrance to circulate without closure. This is the sensibility we attempt to carry into the rehearsal room.

Within rehearsal, Lyle, Darnell, and I cultivate a practice grounded in reciprocity and deeper listening to the space around us. The work calls for an ethic of attention; a material condition of making that activates embodied knowledge through relation. Queer lineages, spoken names, political texts, poetry, and lived recollections become operative materials within the performance. Together, we are mobilizing a language that can only emerge through performance itself.

This process continually returns me to questions regarding perception and transmission. I’ve been employing listening as a practice of attunement, attending to the sensory pathways through which the archive circulates. The body becomes less a repository and more of a conduit through which history is activated, translated, and made present again. 

As we prepare to perform in Aspen, I am interested in how the landscape participates in the production of meaning. I want to meet the place with the same attentiveness that has shaped this collaboration, therefore allowing presence itself to become a form of collective inquiry. Until then, I look forward to breathing in a new place together.

Darnell L. Moore:

Lyle moves by spirit, guided by instinct rather than formal method. He returns to the archive of his photographs and memories and trusts the stories they carry to emerge in their own time. I am drawn to artists who make words leap from the page into the hearts and minds of audiences. What has emerged between the three of us honors that way of working.

Our process is organic, transformative, and rooted in care. In one of our sessions, we found ourselves looking at Untitled (Middletown, Connecticut, 1985), in which Lyle photographed himself beneath a shower, water cascading over his body. As we talked, Raymond rose and began to move, his body giving form to what the photograph was revealing in that moment. “We need to hear the sound of water,” I said—rainfall, or the steady rush of a shower. These are what we call the “organic movements” that arise from allowing the works to serve as apertures for our imaginations, as doorways and windows into lived experience.

Every conversation reshapes us long before it becomes a theatrical or dramaturgical note. As three Black gay men from three different generations, we challenge one another, asking how our understanding of ourselves—and of each other—has shifted in relation to our bodies, our histories, and our ways of being. The work has fostered a loving and vital intergenerational friendship through which we have come to understand that the specificity of Black queer life is also a profound expression of our shared humanity.

We return again and again to loss, grief, longing, violence, and the desire to be seen and understood. To create this work at a time when erasure and illegibility are being legislated into being—when the push against our very existence is so loud—has been profoundly transformative. Having the space to create together, to care for one another, and to be with echoes of ourselves has been a remarkable gift.

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On Oracle, a newly commissioned performance by Lyle Ashton Harris, premiered at the Aspen Art Museum on July 29, 2026 as part of AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape. Learn more about the performance here.

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