Lyle Ashton Harris: Blow Up

The Washington Post’s Jessica Dawson recently wrote of New York-based artist Lyle Ashton Harris, Two decades into his career, Harris still concerns himself with the game of appearances and perception: how we present ourselves in public, how our bodies–and the meanings they carry–are received by others, how gender and race are constructed… He also reveals a poetic sensibility: a desire, shared by writers and poets, to make visible our complicated inner worlds. He acknowledges the ambivalences we carry. Blow Up, Harris’ first retrospective monograph, published on the occasion of his 2008 traveling exhibition, which originated at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, features full-color reproductions from throughout his career: His white face self-portraits of the late 1980s, his collage-based work of the mid-1990s and his more recent Polaroid self-portraits, large-scale Blow Up collages and Ghana-based photographs. Designed by award-winning COMA, the volume includes several important new essays as well as a revealing conversation between Harris and artist Senam Okudzeto. Published in collaboration with the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.