Tag Archives: Lyle Ashton Harris

FIRST SATURDAYS: OUT AND PROUD

Charles Demuth’s “Dancing Sailors” is part of “HIDE/SEEK” exhibition at Brooklyn Museum (courtesy Demuth Museum, Lancaster, Pennsylvania)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, January 7, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum will be celebrating gay pride in its January First Saturday program, featuring a screening of Rent (Christopher Columbus, 2005) hosted by Peppermint, live performances by Nhojj, Ariel Aparicio, Melissa Ferrick, and 3 Teens Kill 4, an artist talk with Lyle Ashton Harris and a curator talk with Jonathan Katz about the exhibition “HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” live-model sketching, a dance party led by DJ Tikka Masala, a book club reading of Chulito by author Charles Rice-Gonzalez, an artist talk with Kymia Nawabi, the second-season winner of Bravo’s Work of Art, and a multimedia, interactive Brown Bear performance installation by A. K. Burns and Katherine Hubbard that includes free haircuts. Among the other special exhibitions on view are “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties,” “Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk — An Introspective,” “Lee Mingwei: ‘The Moving Garden,’” “Eva Hesse Spectres, 1960,” “Matthew Buckingham: ‘The Spirit and the Letter,’” and “ReOrder: An Architectural Environment by Situ Studio.”

LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: SELF/PORTRAIT

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.