“In March 2018, while I was in Paris for the opening of Once (Now) Again at the Centre Pompidou, my father, Thomas Allen Harris Sr., died. My brother, Thomas, had been able to say goodbye to our father in person before he passed. I had already begun spiritually reconciling my complicated bond with my estranged father through breathwork sessions, working with Christian de la Huerta. This helped me see my father as once a child himself, rather than as an absent guardian. A letter I had written to my father decades ago, which I had previously included in The Watering Hole VI, 1996, was digitally transferred and printed on archival silk to become Untitled (DAD), a new Blow Up wall collage that served as the centerpiece for my installation and performance at Participant Inc. in May that year in New York.”
“This studio study is a montage of images of my close friend Prince, who I met in 2005 and photographed while I was living in Ghana. These selected photos include images of him working out with his buddies at the Schwarzenegger Gym, sunbathing at Kokrobite beach, and visiting my residence in the guest chalet of the Scott House in Accra. The larger photo below portrays Prince reclining in an odalisque pose at New York University’s faculty house in Accra’s Osu neighborhood. In 2010 I produced a series of photographic studies of Prince on canvas with Adamson Editions, and he has continued to be a recurrent figure throughout my Ghana work over the last two decades.”
This portrait portrays brothers Lyle Ashton Harris and Thomas Allen Harris Jr. with their biological father, Thomas Allen Harris Sr., photographed in the mid-1960s by their maternal grandfather, Albert Sidney Johnson Jr., who worked for the New York Port Authority as a systems analyst. For thirty-seven years he served as treasurer at Bethel AME Church in Harlem, one of New York City’s oldest Black congregations, founded in 1819. Over five decades, the Harris brothers’ grandfather shot more than ten thousand Ektachrome slides and 8mm films documenting the lives of his family, friends, and his church community—an extensive family archive that has proven foundational for the artistic practices of both Harris brothers.
Print/collage study by Lyle Ashton Harris with African Arts 6, No. 1 (Autumn 1972) and Untitled (Orange Grove Avenue #2, Los Angeles, 1989) on Ghanaian funerary fabric, 2019, archival pigment print, 5 × 7 in.
“The self-portrait that I pinned to Ghanaian funerary fabric was photographed in the summer of my first year of grad school at Cal Arts. I had sublet an apartment from John Greyson and Gary Kibbins; this photo was taken on the roof of that apartment building in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles.”
Lyle Ashton Harris, Chelsea Studio Study (Silver Handcuffs and Prison Letters), 2014, chromogenic print, 4 × 6 in.
Shown hanging on Harris’s studio wall are two prints of his Untitled (Silver Handcuffs), 2007, and two proofs printed on silk crepe de chine of Untitled (Letter #1), 2014, an enlarged image of a one-page, handwritten letter that Harris received from an incarcerated prisoner who had written to him after seeing the artist’s profile in Ebony magazine in 2007. Writing two days before his forty-third birthday, he describes himself as ruggedly handsome with brown skin, six feet tall, very muscular. From Brooklyn, he shared that he had been adopted by a dysfunctional family and his adoptive mother died when he was eighteen years old. After that, he wrote, “The streets were my parents,” and he was “in and out of reformatory slave camps” until being incarcerated in prison for the last twenty years. He concluded, “I’m still a loving, caring, honest, lonely great person, a human being who has been looking up to stupidity and ignorance. So when I came across a handsome, successful brown brotha I figured this is [. . .] who I should’ve looked up [to] all my life. Maybe I could have met real role models like yourself.”
Artist's newspaper clipping from Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo, "South Carolina Officer Is Charged with Murder of Walter Scott," New York Times, April 7, 2015, 3 1/4 × 5 1/2 in.
This photograph is a still taken from a video recording of the murder of Walter Scott, a fifty-year-old African American man who was fatally shot by Michael Slager, a white police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, on April 4, 2015. In 1871 North Charleston grew out of Liberty Hill, one of the city’s oldest free communities of color that remains predominantly Black. After a routine stop for a nonfunctioning brake light, Scott’s life ended when he was shot in the back by the officer, who was sentenced to twenty years in prison for second-degree murder; the city awarded the Scott family $6.5 million in compensatory damages. Two months later and ten miles away, Emanuel AME, a Black church with a ministry in Charleston since the mid-nineteenth century, lost nine of its members to a massacre by twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof, an avowed neo-Nazi white supremacist.
“In 2005 while visiting Bonwire, a village in Ghana’s Ashanti Region traditionally renowned as the place where Kente cloth originated, I acquired the fabric pictured, which was hand painted in front of me. A decade later I took up residence in New York’s Hudson Valley, initially residing in a repurposed barn located in Clermont, where every summer I was overwhelmed by an infestation of cluster flies that entered through cracks in the window sills. Eventually I started using sticky traps seasonally, hence the photo of the trapped flies against the African fabric.”
Lyle Ashton Harris, Untitled (Lyle and Aurel, Cologne, 1992), 2022 (detail), gelatin silver print, 16 × 20 in.
“For Creative Time’s 42nd Street Art Project in 1993, I scouted the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood between 7th and 8th Avenues near Times Square to prepare for my presentation titled The Victory Parade (which was presented in the sidewalk display vitrines of the landmark Victory Theater). That’s when I found this discarded poster with the words ‘The Ultimate Male Shop’—a readymade that has since appeared in several of my montage works, including The Watering Hole I – IX (1996) and most recently in Oracle (2020).”
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On Oracle, a newly commissioned performance by Lyle Ashton Harris, premieres at the Aspen Art Museum on July 29, 2026 as part of AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape. Learn more about the performance here.
