Lyle Ashton Harris

Hours and Days ~A Suite of 10 Photographs~

July 29 - August 17, 2022

Opening reception: Friday, July 29, 7 - 9 pm

“I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. 

Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning.”

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

We are very happy to present the first public presentation of this remarkable exhibition of photographs by Lyle Ashton Harris. This exhibition covers a critical early period of maturation and development in his work. These are photos about being young, about being seen, about sex and love, about the search for happiness and the drive to feel everything one can. There is a kind of slow intimacy depicted here, a tenderness of touch, of softness, of the ease of the familiar. As such, it seems an especially appropriate time to be revisiting them, and re-contextualizing them by bringing them into the dialogue and succession of contemporary gay images, while at the same time demonstrating their interconnectedness with his other work. The photographs in this exhibition are intrinsically joined to both narratives. 

Harris’ years-long documentation of close friends, lovers and acquaintances was strikingly presented as the Ektachrome Archives and included images of some of icons of the emerging international community of writers, academics, theorists, and artists of the Black and queer world at that crucial time. It is a rich and deeply interwoven tapestry of contemporary life in the 1980s and 1990s. Much of the work in the current suite precede or overlap the Archives in time. It is significant that right now, from the vantage point of 2022, Lyle is taking a deep look back in this exhibition at the early days that formed his development and growth as an artist. He told us that he is thinking about the meaning in these photographs against the backdrop of today’s image bombardment via social media. Within the context of the emergence of “social awareness,” Black Lives Matter, the ongoing fight for LGBTQ+ rights, Zoom meetings, Grindr, performances at a fingertip via the internet, and all the other demands and intrusions on our psyche, these seem to exist as an oasis for regenerating the spirit. These photographs are all black and white gelatin silver prints which brings a physical sensuousness to the photographs, and aligns them within the traditional, historical narrative of photography, as well as with some of Harris’s earliest seminal works. Hours and Days drifts through days and nights of intimacy between Lyle and some of his close lovers.

Lyle Ashton Harris was born in the Bronx, New York in 1965, and was raised in both Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, (1974–‘76) and in New York. Some of the more significant exhibitions that he has been part of include Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, curated by Thelma Golden at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1994; the Busan Biennial (2008), the Bienal de São Paulo (2016), and Once (Now) Again presented by Cinéma Du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018). He received the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in 2014 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. Other prominent collections include the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He joined the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome in 2014, and was appointed a trustee of the Tiffany Foundation in 2016.