CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/12/2024

All the kinds of love in a powerful new monograph from Lyle Ashton Harris

Featured spreads are from Our first and last love, the gorgeous new catalog to Lyle Ashton Harris’s Queens Museum survey—on view through September 22, en route from Rose Art Museum and the Nasher Museum. Titled after a multi-artwork-spawning 1990s fortune cookie that read, “Our first and last love is … Self-love,” the book contains work from across Harris’s career, addressing themes of race, family, gender and sexual identity, among others. When asked by co-curator Caitlin Julia Rubin what that phrase has meant to him, Harris replies, “Clearly the message had a strong impact on me. In the early 1990s the question of narcissism may have come up in a disparaging way in critiques of the photographic work that I was producing at CalArts. Nonetheless I think what the fortune cookie conveyed to me at the time—the necessity of loving care for oneself—has contributed to making me who I am as an artist, and its message is still relevant today. In thinking about how it may have influenced my artwork, self-love has served as a support to sustain me while engaging difficult issues… Still, in keeping with how I felt more than three decades ago, I can see how that Chinese fortune cookie message somehow recurrently sustained me through acts of resistance, especially in settings where same-sex love remains a crime, such as in Ghana, where rather than merely negotiating those social constraints, I remained unabashedly ‘out.’ In a way, I think that ‘Our first and last love is … Self-love’ articulates a creative ethic that implicitly informs the multivalent ways I negotiate diverse social spaces and explore various creative mediums, and continues to resonate even more strongly with me in the present day.”