Lyle Ashton Harris, Americas, 1987–88 (printed 2007). Gelatin silver prints, sheet: 101.6 × 76.2 cm each; image: 76 × 50.5 cm each, AP 1/2, edition of 10. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee 2011.57 © Lyle Ashton Harris
This weekend the Guggenheim New York is hosting an event on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Carrie Mae Weems: three decades of photography and video’ (till May 11). About 50 artists, scholars, poets and musicians are talking about or presenting their work. There are discussions and tributes to Terry Adkins and Stuart Hall, who died recently.
Three of the participants are Lyle Ashton Harris, Xaviera Simmons and Leslie Hewitt. Their work is in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim. Some information about their work (quote from blog Guggenheim written by Carmen Hermo):
Portraiture has been a touchstone in Lyle Ashton Harris’s photographic practice for three decades, yet his work is never a simple shot of a sitter. Instead, Harris photographs the body—often his body—as a way to understand the self and explore racial and gendered difference. In Americas (1987–88), Harris appears in whiteface and a wig, obscuring instantaneous assignations of gender and race. Ecstasy #2 (1987–88) also features the artist—this time, captured while moving in an undetermined gesture: is it anger, playfulness, or rapture that overtakes him? Awash in deep blacks and glowing whites, the photograph explores the grey space of identity itself.
Leslie Hewitt utilizes photography in a very different, almost sculptural, way. Between 2002 and 2009, Hewitt created the three-part Riffs on Real Time, groups of ten photographs whose title alludes to rhythmic and improvisational relationships across the series. The building of connections reflects the physical assemblage of each photograph, which combines a personal or family snapshot, discarded historical ephemera, and a richly textured physical backdrop into a stacked visual construction. Rather than tell a story-within-a-story, the tri-part images instead become a kind of recombinant source of historical narratives, personal recollections, and a subtle portrait of shared American histories.
Xaviera Simmons describes her Index/Composition series as her way of “reaching out to the sculptural in the photographic.” Photographs like Index Two Composition Three (2012) appear, at first glance, to be documents of colorful, complex sculptures, but the sculpture is actually attached to an individual, typically revealed from beneath a large skirt. In this work, fabric and clothespins intertwine fragments of text and images with objects like small jars, fake hair, and palm fronds, creating an explosive mélange of color, content, and form. The skirt has been flipped up to expose the sculpture and obscure the person. That abstracted body and individual is ultimately replaced by the unique and telling components of the assemblage, allowing the archive of personal artifacts to stand in as portrait of the performer.
Julie Mehretu was another one of the participants.