Lyle Ashton Harris, Visiting Artist Lecture 2018

Artist Lyle Ashton Harris reflects on the history of Skowhegan and reminds the current participants about the importance of building connections there as a way to create stability for what to come next. Harris shows slideshows of his photographs to the soundtracks of Grace Jones, reflecting on family relationships and a documentation of his life from the late 1980s and early 1990s. For Harris, photographs allow him to explore the power of archives and their ability to offer counter narratives. Mural printing is another form that Harris works with as a way to deal with language, notions of ambivalence, the idea of mirroring, and collaboration. Harris reflects on the romantic notion of African American identity and how it keeps him connected to communities in other geographical places, while also placing him a little bit on the outside through his queerness. Harris then reflects on what it means to appropriate icons, giving them elasticity through sculpture, photography, and installation. Finally, Harris ends his lecture talking about the power of art to claim a space that once wasn’t given, and how this can lead to thinking about the past as a way to reimagine the future and create an organic element of coming together.