This interview was featured in Issue No. 24 - Identity

ANDREA BLANCH: I’d like to talk a little bit about your childhood and your time in Tanzania.

LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: I grew up in the Bronx, but I lived in East Africa in the mid-seventies while I was an adolescent, from nine to eleven.

ANDREA: What was that like?

LYLE: It was a very interesting time. In a sense it was post-Civil Rights, and it was also a time when a lot of African Americans were answering the call to go abroad and to be of service in Africa. And it wasn’t the first wave. On the eve of Ghanaian independence from British colonial rule, Nkrumah invited Richard Wright in late ’56 to go over and to experience Ghana. So Wright’s book, Black Power, was a travel log documenting his time there. My mother was probably the second or third wave of Americans who were post-Civil Rights, who were going over to be of service, in my mother’s case, as a teacher.

ANDREA: How did that experience bear on your 2018-19 exhibition “Flash of the Spirit”?

LYLE: Well, there are close to forty years between my adolescence in Africa and the “Flash of the Spirit” body of work, which is the confluence of many different concerns. I had rediscovered some images from my earlier Constructs series that had been shown in 1996, but were shot in 1989, yet people felt that they could have been made the day before. So I was curious about what it would mean for a middle-aged man to go back to the body and see what that older body had to offer at this particular time. It was also prompted by a gift given to me by my uncle Harold Epps. He’d traveled throughout West Africa from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and he had acquired several traditional masks. While growing up I would see these masks. “Flash of the Spirit” was a confluence of that with the renewed energy towards my earlier body of work. Also I began thinking more about these themes when I was living in Ghana while teaching at NYU Global. I had already moved away from self-portraiture, and my brother, the filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris, asked me to consider what it would be like to somehow re-engage those ideas of the self and subjectivity, and particularly in contemporary culture, which puts so much emphasis on youth. I thought it would be interesting to see what actually happens if I were to open up that space.

ANDREA: How did you get from “Flash of the Spirit” to the Shadow Works?

LYLE: That’s an interesting question, and I’m still trying to understand their complex relation, because this new series of work is still unfolding. There has been an element of abstraction to my work from the beginning, even in the montage work that I had been doing, but I think the Shadow Works were prompted by several things. One was the acquisition and display of The Watering Hole at MoMA twenty years after it was originally produced, which led me to think about some of my earlier concerns regarding the relationship of personal narrative to collage and montage work. Then, I believe it was in late 2017, I got a prompt from my Miami gallerist David Castillo, who encouraged me to think about doing a new work; he is a very big advocate of my work in terms of the deep challenges that it poses with its aesthetic and conceptual richness. And I was also thinking about what it would mean to return to the scene of the crime, if you will, and to the archive. Prior to that, in 2013 I’d rediscovered an archive of my earlier Ektachrome work that had been in storage, the Ektachrome Archive, which formed the basis of my installation at the Whitney Biennial in 2017. But there were other images, for example, that didn’t fall into that particular trajectory, images that were more personal, images that resurfaced over and over, even if they’d been shot thirty or forty years earlier. So I began to think about why some images kept on resurfacing? What’s getting worked out for me conceptually, but also formally? What’s getting worked out in terms of the content that I’m trying to unpack? When the first one of the Shadow Works premiered, it was very different from my previous work, but it had something that I think has always been there in terms of my thinking about imagery, applying pressure to the imagery, letting it somehow bubble up. I began to work with other media, thinking about how, materially, the surface could at once flatten and at the same time reveal. And as opposed to trying to fit it all in one image, I began to think about the possibilities of maybe one or two or a few surfaces that were embedded together.

Read the rest of this interview in Issue No. 24 - Identity