Lyle Ashton Harris American, b. 1965

 Lyle Ashton Harris is an American artist who has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photographic media, collage, installation art and performance art. Harris uses his works to comment on societal constructs of sexuality and race, while exploring his own identity as a queer black man.

Lyle Ashton Harris was born in the Bronx and currently lives and works between New York and Accra, Ghana.

" I sought a plurality of masks, several borrowed from my family’s collection of African masks belonging to my uncle. I often encountered such masks in my childhood, which have embedded themselves into my identity. In their reanimation, my mythopoetic portraits aim to recharge and reclaim these familial objects. I have employed masquerade variously throughout my thirty-year career. Alluding to an Afrofuturistic aesthetic, my work luxuriates in my cultural roots, embodying a series of enigmatic masked figures engaged in a bold, uninhibited dance of gestures, taking us beyond stereotypical affectations of sci-fi superheroes or sentimental ethnographic conceits.Celebrating our place amidst nature, these works are dramatic, carnival-esque and playfully primal. While harking to my early photographs that I once ascribed to “mastery of the false self,” these images possess a confidence that can only be attributed to a life spent mastering the true self."