Conversation: Lyle Ashton Harris and Daniel Merritt

In this recorded conversation, Lyle Ashton Harris joins Aspen Art Museum Chief Curator Daniel Merritt to reflect on a practice shaped by accumulation, return, and revision. Moving between photography, collage, and archival assemblage, Harris describes how images—of his friends and lovers, as well as cultural figures—circulate across decades of his practice, reappearing in new configurations that collapse distinctions between personal history and broader social narratives. The dialogue traces his ongoing engagement with intimacy, authorship, and the rupture of identities, offering insight into how acts of recontextualization can open space for new meanings to emerge over time.

About the Artist
Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice, ranging from photography and collage to video installation and performance art, examining the impact of race, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic globally through intersections of the personal and the political. Harris has been widely exhibited internationally, and his work is included in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Tate Modern among many other public and private collections. His Ektachrome Archive was the subject of a photography monograph published by Aperture in 2017 and an exhibition catalogue published by ICA Miami in 2023. A solo exhibition spanning three decades of his work was presented with accompanying catalogue by the Queens Museum, New York, in 2024.