Lyle Ashton Harris: Flash of the Spirit at Salon 94
Lyton Ashton Harris
Flash of the Spirit
November 9th – December 21st, 2018
With Lyle Ashton Harris’s inaugural show at Salon 94, a performance of another sort has begun. The fifty-three-year-old artist returns to self-portraiture, unabashedly claiming his place as an artist for whom sexuality, race, gender, ethnicity, class—and now aging—continue as core engagements. To enact this series, Harris sought a plurality of masks, several borrowed from his family’s collection of African masks belonging to his uncle, Harold Epps, who traveled throughout West Africa in the 1960s. Growing up in both the Bronx and East Africa, Harris often encountered such masks, which have embedded themselves into his identity. In their reanimation, his mythopoetic portraits aim to recharge and reclaim these familial objects.
