Kira Lynn Harris

Last updated

Kira Lynn Harris
Born1963 (age 59–60)
Los Angeles, California, United States
NationalityAmerican
Education University of California at Santa Cruz
Alma mater California Institute of the Arts

Kira Lynn Harris (born 1963) is an African-American mixed-media artist who currently lives and teaches in New York City. [1]

Contents

Life

Kira Lynn Harris was born in 1963 in Los Angeles, California. Harris received her BA in Studio Art from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and then earned her MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts in 1998.

Career

In addition to multiple solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Italy, Canada, and South Africa, Harris has also served as an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001–2002), the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2004), St. Mary's College of Maryland (2005), Omi International Art Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art (2006). [2] Her work has been exhibited at many galleries, including MoMA PS1, Miami Art Museum, Bruno Marina Gallery, and the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. [3] [4] She has participated in the following group exhibitions: Blues for Smoke (MoCA and Whitney Museum), Black Light (White Noise Contemporary Art Museum and Freestyle Studio Museum Harlem). [5]

Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times , Time Out New York , and the Los Angeles Times , among others. [6] [7] Critics have described her work as "minimal," making use of installation, drawing, photography, and video to express "formal concerns of space, light and the phenomenological with issues of individual subjectivity." [8] [9] She has also made use of reflective surfaces like mirror or silver leaf to highlight the architecture of space. [10] Of her work, Harris explains, "My projects often provide a disorienting encounter for the viewer: in my installations I am concerned with destabilization and re-orientation. To achieve this I often create architectural and environmental interventions – by using light and reflective surfaces; by inverting subject and object or figure and ground; and/or by reversing up and down, exterior and interior." [11]

Harris has stated that her work is influenced by artists like James Turrell, Mark Rothko, and the Hudson River School painters. She also explained, "A lot of my interest in light came from being from Los Angeles, where the light is just everywhere. You have these huge expanses of sky". [12] She has also cited science fiction, as well as films and cityscapes like Metropolis and Mad Max as influences. [13]

Works

Prizes and awards

In 1998 Harris won the Lorser Feitelson Emerging Artist award. In 2003 she won the Harvestworks artist-in-residence video production grant. [18]

Personal life

Harris now resides in New York City, New York and teaches art to both high schoolers and college students. She has been an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Music at John Jay College, as well as a part of the Art Faculty at Nightingale-Bamford School. [19] [20]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African-American art</span> Visual arts of the people of African descent in the United States of America

African-American art is a broad term describing visual art created by African Americans. The range of art they have created, and are continuing to create, over more than two centuries is as varied as the artists themselves. Some have drawn on cultural traditions in Africa, and other parts of the world, for inspiration. Others have found inspiration in traditional African-American plastic art forms, including basket weaving, pottery, quilting, woodcarving and painting, all of which are sometimes classified as "handicrafts" or "folk art".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fatimah Tuggar</span> Nigerian artist

Fatimah Tuggar is a interdisciplinary artist born in Nigeria and based in the United States. Tuggar uses collage and digital technology to create works that investigates dominant and linear narratives of gender, race, and technology. She is currently an associate professor of AI in the Arts: Art & Global Equity at the University of Florida in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Patterson</span> American musician

Benjamin Patterson was an American musician, artist, and one of the founders of the Fluxus movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heather Hart</span> American visual artist

Heather T. Hart is an American visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.

"Where We At" Black Women Artists, Inc. (WWA) was a collective of Black women artists affiliated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It included artists such as Dindga McCannon, Kay Brown, Faith Ringgold, Carol Blank, Jerri Crooks, Charlotte Kâ (Richardson), and Gylbert Coker. Where We At was formed in the spring of 1971, in the wake of an exhibition of the same name organized by 14 Black women artists at the Acts of Art Gallery in Greenwich Village. Themes such as the unity of the Black family, Black female independence and embodiment, Black male-female relationships, contemporary social conditions, and African traditions were central to the work of the WWA artists. The group was intended to serve as a source of empowerment for African-American women, providing a means for them to control their self-representation and to explore issues of Black women's sensibility and aesthetics. Like AfriCobra, a Chicago-based Black Arts group, the WWA was active in fostering art within the African-American community and using it as a tool of awareness and liberation. The group organized workshops in schools, jails and prisons, hospitals, and cultural centers, as well as art classes for youth in their communities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicole Eisenman</span> American artist

Nicole Eisenman is a French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial. On September 29, 2015, she won a MacArthur Fellowship award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Senga Nengudi</span> African-American visual artist (born 1943)

Senga Nengudi is an African-American visual artist and curator. She is best known for her abstract sculptures that combine found objects and choreographed performance. She is part of a group of African-American avant-garde artists working in New York City and Los Angeles, from the 1960s and onward.

Cynthia Marie "Tina" Girouard was an American video and performance artist best known for her work and involvement in the SoHo art scene of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Freestyle was a contemporary art exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem from April 28-June 24, 2001 curated by Thelma Golden with the support of curatorial assistant Christine Y. Kim. Golden curated the works of 28 emerging black artists for the exhibition, characterizing the work as 'Post-Black'. The latter is a term she generated along with artist Glenn Ligon as a genre of art "that had ideological and chronological dimensions and repercussions. It was characterized by artists who were adamant about not being labeled as 'black' artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness." Freestyle was her first major project at The Studio Museum in Harlem and the first of an ongoing series of 'F' themed exhibitions including Frequency, Flow and Fore. The most recent iteration of the series was 2017's Fictions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennie C. Jones</span> American artist

Jennie C. Jones is an African-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been described, by Ken Johnson, as evoking minimalism, and paying tribute to the cross-pollination of different genres of music, especially jazz. As an artist, she connects most of her work between art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. In 2012, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize, one of the biggest awards given to an individual artist in the United States. The prize honors one African-American artist who has proven their commitment to innovation and creativity, with an award of 50,000 dollars. In December 2015 a 10-year survey of Jones's work, titled Compilation, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.

Nicole Miller is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elia Alba</span> American multidisciplinary artist (born 1962)

Elia Alba (1962) was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Queens, New York. Alba's ongoing project The Supper Club depicts contemporary artists of color in portraits, and presents dinners where a diverse array of artists, curators, historians and collectors address topics related to people of color and to women.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paula Wilson</span> American artist

Paula Wilson is an African American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.

Shiva Ahmadi is an Iranian-born American artist, known for her paintings, videos, and installations. Her work has been exhibited at galleries and museums in North America and the Middle East.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shani Peters</span>

Shani Peters is an artist from Lansing, Michigan based in New York. She received her BA from Michigan State University and her MFA from the City College of New York, where she taught as of 2020. Her work often addresses issues related to social justice in a range of media and processes including printmaking, interpretations of record-keeping, collaborative projects, video, and collage. In 2019, she was a Joan Mitchell Foundation artist-in-residence in New Orleans. In 2017, she exhibited at Columbia University's Wallach Gallery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tschabalala Self</span> American artist

Tschabalala Self is an American artist best known for her depictions of Black female figures using paint, fabric, and discarded pieces of her previous works. Though she uses mixed media, all of her works are on canvas and employ a "painting language." Inspired by works done by an African-American artist, Romare Bearden, Self creates collages of various items that she has collected over time and sews them together to depict Black female bodies that "defy the narrow spaces in which they are forced to exist". She derives the concept from the history behind the African-American struggle and oppression in society. Self reclaims the Black female body and portrays them to be free of stereotypes without having to fear being punished. Her goal is to "create alternative narratives around the Black body." Much of Self's work uses elements from Black culture to construct quilt-like portraits. Self lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Baseera Khan</span> American artist

Baseera Khan is an American visual artist. They use a variety of mediums in their practice to "visualize patterns and repetitions of exile and kinship shaped by economic, social, and political changes in local and global environments, with special interests in decolonization processes".

Nancy Floyd, born in Monticello, Minnesota in 1956, is an American photographer. Her photographic subjects mainly concern women and the female body during youth, pregnancy, and while aging. Her project She's Got a Gun comprises portraits of women and their firearms, which is linked to her Texas childhood. Floyd's work has been shown in 18 solo exhibitions and is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the High Museum of Art. Floyd is a professor emeritus of photography at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University.

Caitlin Cherry is an African-American painter, sculptor, and educator.

References

  1. ↑ Biography: Kira Lynn Harris, re-title.com, 2015, archived from the original on 24 November 2015, retrieved 24 November 2015
  2. ↑ "Kira Lynn Harris". Shiva Gallery. Retrieved 12 March 2017.
  3. ↑ "Kira Lynn Harris". Shiva Gallery. Retrieved 12 March 2017.
  4. ↑ ARTIST'S PROJECT: KIRA LYNN HARRIS, Esopus, Fall 2006, retrieved 24 November 2015
  5. ↑ "Kira Lynn Harris". amt.parsons.edu. Retrieved 12 March 2017.
  6. ↑ Cotter, Holland (2 August 2002), "ART IN REVIEW; 'Ironic/Iconic' -- Kira Lynn Harris, Adia Millett and Kehinde Wiley", The New York Times , retrieved 24 November 2015
  7. ↑ Knight, Christopher (29 October 2012), "Review: MOCA's 'Blues for Smoke' improvises and captivates", Los Angeles Times , retrieved 24 November 2015
  8. ↑ Nengundi, Senga (2009), Kira Lynn Harris: Curated by Senga Nengudi, CUE Art Foundation, retrieved 24 November 2015
  9. ↑ Caruth, Nicole (2010), Just Beyond Reality's Edge: Kira Lynn Harris, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, retrieved 24 November 2015
  10. ↑ "Over 40, under the Radar: Eight Midcareer Artists Who Prove That Experience Trumps Novelty". Modern Painters. 23: 58–63.
  11. ↑ Faculty: KIRA LYNN HARRIS, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 2015, retrieved 24 November 2015
  12. ↑ Sheets, Hilarie (1 March 2007), Waves of Light, ARTnews, retrieved 24 November 2015
  13. ↑ "Kira Lynn Harris: Glittering Dystopias" . Retrieved 10 March 2018.
  14. ↑ "Just Beyond Reality's Edge: Kira Lynn Harris by Nicole J. Caruth". CUE Art Foundation. Retrieved 12 March 2017.
  15. ↑ "Kira Lynn Harris (Artist) in New York, NY (New York) from re-title.com". www.re-title.com. Retrieved 12 March 2017.
  16. ↑ "Just Beyond Reality's Edge: Kira Lynn Harris by Nicole J. Caruth". CUE Art Foundation. Retrieved 12 March 2017.
  17. ↑ Caruth, Nicole J. (21 September 2010). "Just Beyond Reality's Edge: Kira Lynn Harris". Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. 2010 (27): 90–99. doi:10.1215/10757163-2010-27-90. ISSN   1075-7163. S2CID   190701895.
  18. ↑ "Kira Lynn Harris". Shiva Gallery. Retrieved 12 March 2017.
  19. ↑ "The Nightingale-Bamford School". The Nightingale-Bamford School. Retrieved 12 March 2017.
  20. ↑ "Kira Lynn Harris | John Jay College of Criminal Justice". www.jjay.cuny.edu. Retrieved 12 March 2017.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.