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Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love

August 24, 2023 – January 07, 2024
Lyle Ashton Harris, Afropunk Odalisque, 2018. Dye sublimation print on aluminum. Edition AP1. © Lyle Ashton Harris. Image courtesy of the artist and Salon 94.
Lyle Ashton Harris
Lyle Ashton Harris, 2021. © Lloyd Foster. Image courtesy of the artist.

Drawing together photographs and installations from both his celebrated and lesser-known series, Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love charts new connections across the artistic practice of Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965, Bronx, NY). The exhibition explores Harris’s critical examination of identity and self-portraiture while tracing central themes and formal approaches in his work of the last 35 years.

The artist’s recently-completed Shadow Works anchor the exhibition. In these meticulous constructions, photographic prints are set within geometric frames of stretched Ghanaian funerary textiles, along with shells, shards of pottery, and cuttings of the artist’s own hair. Our first and last love follows the cues of the Shadow Works’ collaged and pictured elements—which include earlier artworks and reference materials, personal snapshots, and handwritten notes—to shed light on Harris’s layered approach to his practice.

Harris’s work engages with broad social and political dialogues while also speaking with revelatory tenderness to his own communities, and to personal struggles, sorrows, and self-illuminations. Groupings centered around singular Shadow Works will expand upon these multiple through lines, including Harris’s continued examination of otherness and belonging; the framing and self-presentation of Black and queer individuals; violence as a dark undercurrent of intimacy and desire; tenderness and vulnerability; and notions of legacy—both inherited and self-defined.

Featured Featured Video

Artist Lyle Ashton Harris

This is a 5-minute video about the artist Lyle Ashton Harris, whose work is part of the Nasher Museum collection. In this video, the artist visits the Nasher Museum  on the occasion of his solo exhibition, Lyle Ashton ...

by Nasher Museum Duration 5:08 Published

Support

Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love is co-organized by the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University and Queens Museum, and is co-curated by Caitlin Julia Rubin, Associate Curator, Rose Art Museum, and Lauren Haynes, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs, Queens Museum.

This exhibition and accompanying catalogue are made possible through major support from the Terra Foundation for American Art and Agnes Gund, with additional support from David Castillo Gallery, Shelly and Philip Fox, LGDR New York, The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family, The Marieluise Hessel Foundation, Clarence Otis and Jacqueline Bradley.

At the Nasher Museum, this exhibition is made possible by the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Fund for Exhibitions; the Frank Edward Hanscom Endowment; the J. Horst and Ruth Mary Meyer Fund; the Prakash and Anjali Melwani Fund; the John and Anita Schwarz Family Endowment; and Lisa Lowenthal Pruzan and Jonathan Pruzan.

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