He graduated Wesleyan with an art degree, then went to the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) for an MFA. His mother was a chemistry professor, so it’s not surprising that he began teaching in 2005.
“I was invited to help jumpstart the NYU Accra program in Ghana,” he says. “It was a one semester appointment and I fell in love with the people and the culture, and it somehow became a three-year appointment.” He has been on the faculty of the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development since 2005.
During a whirlwind week in which he was honored at the Queens Museum’s annual gala, Harris spoke with NYU News about the exhibition and his approach to art and teaching.
Our First and Last Love showcases 35 years of your work. How did you decide what to include, and why did you decide to display the pieces thematically rather than chronologically?
We decided to do a thematic show and use the Shadow Works series as the anchor. It is structured around certain themes and clusters, for example, family, desire, intimacy. There are certain tropes that have persisted over the years. It is interesting to see, from a viewer’s standpoint, how these ideas were present early in the work and have persisted over three decades.
One review of the exhibition suggested that you are comfortable with complications. What do you think of this description?
I think we all live complicated lives in complicated worlds. My work has been a wonderful opportunity to mine some of those ideas, to use the process of art to explore and to lay bare what is present in all of our lives.
It’s not that I’m wrestling with these questions. Society is wrestling with them. I am one of several artists who are engaged with these issues. What’s interesting is that the early work is prescient in terms of its exploration of these issues, issues that now have become part of the academy. I studied with [writer and theorist] bell hooks as a first-year graduate student. There was something about those works that resonated because they explored in a complicated way issues of identity and sexuality and race within one frame, as opposed to being bifurcated.
