The big show at the Queens Museum this summer is a survey of the work of photographer Lyle Ashton Harris, “Our first and last love,” which collects art and ephemera from Harris’s life over the last thirty-five years. “He’s turned some three decades-worth of loosely curated personal accumulation into one of the most remarkable bodies of American art around,” Holland Cotter raved of the show, calling it “a data-dense, visually compelling archive, not just of one life but, as seen through that life, of the social and political history of Black queer culture in the post-Stonewall years.”
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Taking special place in the show are Harris’s recent Shadow Works: vitrines that merge still lifes with Ghanaian textiles for a funerary effect. Observer recently caught up with Harris to hear more about how the show came together.
I received the message “Our first and last love is. . . self love” in a fortune cookie while I was visiting Seattle with my friend Tommy Gear in the early 1990s, and I saved it in my journal. A few years later, Creative Time commissioned me, along with two dozen other artists, to produce site-specific public artworks for its 42nd Street Art Project, which was presented in 1993-94. At the time I had been considering the use of language and text in artworks, so I used that fortune cookie message to produce a neon artwork that people might find surprising to encounter in the vicinity of New York’s Times Square. Its message about self-love holds particular significance for me as a queer person, whose sexuality and desires have been historically marginalized, if not condemned and outlawed. Our self-love is fundamental to cultivating compassionate care and empathy for ourselves and others.
My archival impulse is quite strong, which follows on the tradition of artists revisiting themes, memories and experiences they consider still relevant or unresolved. I was approached in........