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About Theodore A. HarrisTheodore A. Harris was born in 1966 in New York City and raised in Philadelphia, where his art practice is based. Harris is Director and Founder of The Institute for Advanced Study in Black Aesthetics, and in 2007 joined the Visual Artists Network.
In 1985 he co-founded the acclaimed Anti-Graffiti Network/Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, and he has taught there since then. Harris is a collagist, poet, and author of Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Formalism, and co-author of books with Amiri Baraka: Our Flesh of Flames (Anvil Arts Press) and Malcolm X as Ideology (LeBow Books); with Fred Moten: i ran from it and was still in it (Cusp Books); as well as TRIPTYCH: Text by Amiri Baraka and Jack Hirschman (Caza de Poesía). Harris has held residencies at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, New Orleans; 40th Street AIR, Philadelphia; Hammonds House Museum, Atlanta; and the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven. His work is in private and public collections, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Center for Africana Studies, the W.E.B. Du Bois College House, and Penn Libraries, University of Pennsylvania; Saint Louis University Museum of Art; and Lincoln University. Select exhibitions include the 9th International Conference, “Black States of Desire,” Collegium for African American Research, Paris; SURFACE POLITICS: Looking Beneath Aesthetics and Formalism, a group exhibition curated by Harris at Salon Joose Studio Gallery, Philadelphia; and the solo exhibition, Collage and Conflict, curated by Klare Scarborough, La Salle University Art Museum, Philadelphia. Detailed information: see Exhibitions, Reviews, Awards, Collections |
Teddy Harris’s work is the modernism of everyday perception and rationale. He makes works from vouchsafes and unrealized dreams, lies and advertisements for the nowheres. That is, he takes scraps of America North and threads them through his truthoscopic sensibility, for instance, pieces of newspapers, headlines, images from the diversity of our mostly grim experience, and he tells it to us again, and clearer.
Harris is a collagist, itself a modern form, and one that has been used to great advantage in pinning the political tale on the donkey, or elephant (or corrupt tiger, as the case may be, e.g. one of the greatest practitioners of the collage art for popular advantage, that is, to tell the truth, was the German collagist Heartfield, who actually pulled Hitler’s tail during the waning years of democracy in Germany. Right-wing politicians feared Heartfield (Herzfeld) because he used the collage to whack them sharply across the face, and lips, revealing their lies and evil to the people). Harris, still a young man, has entered the collage with an astonishing clarity of form. The diverse pieces of reflected reality and unreality he thinks and pastes together create new images, replenishing our knowledge of the known, or making us aware of the unknown. There is a clarity and cleanness to his craftsmanship, which heightens the ideational projection the image sprays at us. At times, visual image actually seems to “say” out loud what maybe we know or need to know. Yet, he has put it together with an impressive display of knowledge about the medium he is using. There are no sloppy or half put together “slapdashes” which we must sympathetically take to the hoop with our political sympathies. Harris is a fine “auteur” (as the film magazines say, meaning, author, creator). And with this, the content, which, for me, is always principal, emerges bright and striking. He tells about the peoples’ struggles, world wide, against oppression and exploitation. Our lives under racism and the twisted rule of capital. At times, the images he thrusts at us are sharp enough to make us wince, with understanding and recognition. Harris’ work is fundamentally about consciousness raising, and this is what art does. Mao says, “All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is Art!” Harris’ work speaks to us truthfully, forcefully, and with great skill. You need to check it out! (May 1998) |
Get in touchTheodore Harris is available for readings, panel discussions, lectures and other collaborative projects.
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