From a media release

Art Book | Lyle Ashton Harris: Our First And Last Love

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Both personal and universal, Harris’s multimedia works weave together legacies of family dynamics, queer histories, and Afro-cosmopolitanism.

Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love, now available, charts new connections across the artistic practice of New York-based artist Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965, Bronx, NY). Informed by an adolescence that unfolded in New York City and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as well as several years spent living in Ghana, Harris explores the complexities of African and African American collective identity while forging his own personal narrative as a Black queer man. The retrospective exhibition chronicles Harris’s approach to representation and self-portraiture while tracing recurrent themes and formal techniques in his work over the last 35 years.

Central to this curated selection is Harris’s most recent series titled Shadow Works, mixed-media assemblages of photographic prints embedded in Ghanaian printed textiles with cowrie shells, pottery, handwritten notes, clippings of the artist’s dreadlocks and other personal ephemera. In both the artist's solo exhibition and this book, these works serve as thematic anchors underscoring Harris’s layered approach to his ongoing creative explorations.

Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love accompanies Harris’s recent successful exhibition, of the same title, at the Queens Museum. To herald the opening of the show, the Queens Museum honored Harris at its annual gala along with stellar figures from the worlds of art, fashion, and business.

Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love, is now available from Distributed Art Publishers, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Walmart.

Lyle Ashton Harris (Photo by Lloyd Foster)

ABOUT LYLE ASHTON HARRIS

LYLE ASHTON HARRIS (b. Bronx, NY, 1965) was raised in New York City and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Harris obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts. He attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

Harris 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 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 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 National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; Tate, London, UK, among others.

Harris has also presented performances at a range of venues, at Volksbühne Grüner Salon sponsored by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2019); a lecture/performance on Andy Warhol presented by the DIA Art Foundation, New York (2018); and an installation/performance at Participant Inc., New York (2018); and a lecture/performance on experimentation, politics and sexuality in the work of filmmaker Marlon T. Riggs at Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver BC, Canada (2020).

Harris received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2016), the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2014), and the Rome Prize Fellowship (2000) among other awards and honours. Harris joined the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome from 2014 and was appointed a trustee of the Tiffany Foundation in 2016.

His work is available from the following fine art galleries: Salon 94 (New York, NY, USA); David Castillo (Miami, FL, USA); Maruani Mercier (Brussels, BE). Harris is a Professor of Art at New York University and lives in New York.