Lyle Ashton Harris, “Untitled (Face/Back #155 Lyle),” Polaroid photograph, 2000 (courtesy the artist and CRG Gallery)
The Studio Museum in Harlem
144 West 125th St. between Lenox Ave. (Malcolm X Blvd.) & Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd. (Seventh Ave.)
Final day: October 23, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
212-864-4500
www.studiomuseum.org
From 1998 to 2008, Bronx-born photographer Lyle Ashton Harris took “Chocolate Polaroids” of his friends, families, and neighbors, taking one picture of their face and another of the back of their head. Nearly two dozen of these fascinating pairings have been collected for the revealing show “Lyle Ashton Harris: Self/Portrait,” which ends today at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The large-format, sepia-toned 20×24-inch works, shot in a SoHo studio, include such familiar figures as Al Sharpton, Tony Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith, and Cindy Sherman along with such less-familiar faces as artist and writer Senam Okudzeto, museum curators Thelma Golden and Robert Storr, visual artist Shirin Neshat, and an exotic dancer named Dorian who has a frightening scar down the back of his head, in addition to Harris himself, with each pair accompanied by brief text. Staring straight into the camera, the subjects feel like they’re communicating something silent but serious to the viewer, saying as much from the front as from the back. Also closing today, when the museum is free from 12 noon to 6:00, are “Spiral: Perspectives on an African-American Art Collective,” with wonderful works from the 1960s group by Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, Emma Amos, and others; “Harlem Postcards Summer 2011,” with postcards by Senetchut Floyd, Phillip Pisciotta, Tribble & Mancenido, and Genesis Valencia; and “Evidence of Accumulation,” a multimedia exhibition of pieces by artists in residence Simone Leigh, Kamau Amu Patton, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, highlighted by Leigh’s six-minute video Breakdown, made with Liz Magic Laser and Alicia Mall Horan.