In Conversation with Lyle Ashton Harris

Situated at the intersection of autobiography and historiography, Lyle Ashton Harris has deftly examined the politics of identity, race, sexuality, and gender over the last thirty-five years. In conversation with Dr. Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Harvard University’s Chair of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harris will discuss his development as an artist, tracing the thematic throughlines found with his earliest series of the 1980s to his recently completed Shadow Works, now in view in Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love.

This program will have automated captions and is hosted via Zoom webinar. Registration is required.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965, Bronx, N.Y.) has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. Harris’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate, London, UK; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland, among others. Harris is a Professor of Art at New York University and lives in New York.

Robert Reid-Pharr (b. 1965,  Charlotte, NC) holds a PhD in American studies and an MA in African American studies from Yale University. He is the author of four books: Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (Oxford University Press, 1999); Black Gay Man: Essays (NYU Press, 2001); Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU Press, 2007); and Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016). His essays have appeared in, among other places, African American Review, American Literature, Art in America, Callaloo, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Women & Performance. Reid-Pharr’s writing has been honored by the Publishing Triangle and the Modern Language Association. In 2015, he was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars, and he is the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship. Reid-Pharr is currently Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.  In June of this year he will leave Harvard to become Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.