Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 5

Born 1965 in Bronx, NY
Lives in New York, NY

Lyle Ashton Harris’s Once (Now) Again is part of a larger ongoing project, the Ektachrome Archive, comprising slide images shot between 1986 and 1998, photographic prints from the artist’s journals, and diaristic video works. The resulting assemblage serves to both memorialize and evoke moments lived at the intersection of the personal and the political.

Bearing witness to a period of seismic shifts—the emergence of multiculturalism, the second wave of AIDS activism, and the interconnection of the contemporary art scene with LGBTQ and African diasporic communities—Harris’s archive documents his friends, family, and lovers. By setting intimate moments alongside landmark events (such as the Black Popular Culture Conference in 1991, the truce between the Crips and the Bloods in 1992, the Black Male exhibition at the Whitney in 1994, and the Black Nations/Queer Nations Conference in 1995), the archive constructs collective and private narratives to comment on identity, desire, sexuality, and loss.

Ektachrome slide images from the three-channel video installation Ektachrome Archives (New York Mix) (2017), part of Once (Now) Again, are available to view online. View the archive.