Quil Lemons

Quil Lemons (b. 1997, South Philadelphia) is a New York-based artist and photographer whose work tenderly reimagines the intersections of Blackness, queerness, masculinity, and kinship. Lemons’ received his B.A from Eugene Lang College at The New School.

His practice is deeply rooted in personal mythology, using the camera to build worlds where softness is a form of resistance and beauty becomes a site of liberation. His images oscillate between the intimate and the iconic, drawing from familial archives, fashion fantasy, and queer futurity to forge a visual language that is at once poetic, political, and defiantly tender.

In 2021, he became the youngest photographer to create the lead image for the cover of Vanity Fair. His work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, Hannah Traore Gallery and internationally across both fine art and editorial platforms. Lemons’ vision is a meditation on care—how we hold one another, how we see ourselves, and how we might be seen anew. He offers not just pictures, but portals.

Ocean Vuong

Writer, professor, and photographer, Ocean Vuong is the author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, winner of the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The New England Book Award. The novel debuted for six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than a million copies in 40 languages. A nominee for the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the poetry collections, Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.

Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of its 100 Leading Global Thinkers, Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. 

Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU.

He currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts and New York City, where he serves as a Professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics in the MFA Program at NYU.

Diego Villarreal

Diego Villarreal Vagujhelyi is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in New York City.

Born in Madrid, Villarreal was immersed in an Old World cultural environment that deeply shaped his artistic development. He began his career in fashion as both a model and photographer—a period during which he honed his craft behind the camera.

Recognizing the limitations of the still image, Villarreal expanded his practice to include sculpture and printmaking—mediums that allow for deeper exploration of material and form.

He is the designer and creative director of VAGUJHELYI, founded in 2022. His debut piece, the VAGUJHELYI 20lb Solid Stainless Steel Weights, premiered with Sized Studio at Frieze New York in 2022.

VAGUJHELYI has since been featured in collaborations with Ludovic de Saint Sernin and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, as well as in PIN–UP Magazine, Cultured Magazine, and GQ.

Diego Villarreal continues to explore the dimensions of his personal identity while redefining the experience and perception of his work.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres was born in Guáimaro, Cuba, in 1957. He earned a BFA in photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, in 1983. Printed Matter, Inc. in New York hosted his first solo exhibition the following year. After obtaining an MFA from the International Center of Photography and New York University in 1987, he worked as an adjunct art instructor at New York University until 1989. Throughout his career, Gonzalez-Torres’s involvement in social and political causes as an openly gay man fueled his interest in the overlap of private and public life. From 1987 to 1991, he was part of Group Material, a New York-based art collective whose members worked collaboratively to initiate community education and cultural activism. His aesthetic project was, according to some scholars, related to Bertolt Brecht’s theory of epic theater, in which creative expression transforms the spectator from an inert receiver to an active, reflective observer and motivates social action. Employing simple, everyday materials (stacks of paper, puzzles, candy, strings of lights, beads) and a reduced aesthetic vocabulary reminiscent of both Minimalism and Conceptual art to address themes such as love and loss, sickness and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality, Gonzalez-Torres asked viewers to participate in establishing meaning in his works.

In his “dateline” pieces, begun in 1987, Gonzalez-Torres assembled lists of various dates in random order interspersed with the names of social and political figures and references to cultural artifacts or world events, many of which related to political and cultural history. Printed in white type on black sheets of paper, these lists of seeming non sequiturs prompted viewers to consider the relationships and gaps between the diverse references as well the construction of individual and collective identities and memories. Gonzalez-Torres also produced dateline “portraits,” consisting of similar lists of dates and events related to the subjects’ lives. In Untitled (Portrait of Jennifer Flay) (1992), for example, “A New Dress 1971” lies next to “Vote for Women, NZ 1893.”

Gonzalez-Torres invited physical as well as intellectual engagement from viewers. His sculptures of wrapped candies spilled in corners or spread on floors like carpets, such as “Untitled” (Public Opinion) (1991), defy the convention of art’s otherworldly preciousness, as viewers are asked to touch and consume the work. Beginning in 1989, he fashioned sculptures of stacks of paper, often printed with photographs or texts, and encouraged viewers to take the sheets. The impermanence of these works, which slowly disappear over time unless they are replenished, symbolizes the fragility of life. While in appearance they sometimes echo the work of Donald Judd, these pieces also belie the Minimalist tenet of aesthetic autonomy: viewers complete the works by depleting them and directly engaging with their material. The artist always wanted the viewer to use the sheets from the stacks—as posters, drawing paper, or however they desired.

In 1991 Gonzalez-Torres began producing sculptures consisting of strands of plastic beads strung on metal rods, like curtains in a disco. Titles such as Untitled (Chemo) (1991) and Untitled (Blood) (1992) undercut their festive associations, calling to mind illness and disease. In 1992 he commenced a series of strands of white low-watt lightbulbs, which could be shown in any configuration—strung along walls, from ceilings, or coiled on the floor. Alluding to celebratory décor—in the vein of the charms of outdoor cafés at night—these delicate garlands are also a campy commentary on the phallic underpinnings of numerous Minimalist creations, particularly Dan Flavin’s rigid light sculptures. Also in 1992, Untitled (1991), a sensual black-and-white photograph of Gonzalez-Torres’s empty, unmade bed with traces of two absent bodies, was installed on 24 billboards throughout the city of New York. This enigmatic image was both a celebration of coupling and a memorial to the artist’s lover, who had recently died of AIDS. Its installation as a melancholic civic-scaled monument problematized public scrutiny of private behavior.

Gonzalez-Torres received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989 and 1993. He participated in hundreds of group shows during his lifetime, including early presentations at Artists Space and White Columns in New York (1987 and 1988, respectively), the Whitney Biennial (1991), the Venice Biennale (1993), SITE Santa Fe (1995), and the Sydney Biennial (1996). Comprehensive retrospective exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (1994); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1995); Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany (1997); and Biblioteca Luis-Angel Arango, Bogotá (2000). Other exhibitions have been held at the Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2006–07); PLATEAU, Seoul (2012); and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2012). A survey of his work, Specific Objects without Specific Form, was organized by WIELS, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels (2010), and then traveled to the Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2010), and the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main (2011). In 2007, Gonzalez-Torres was selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres: America. He died in Miami on January 9, 1996.

Juan Antonio Olivares

Juan Antonio Olivares (b. 1988) was born in Puerto Rico to Colombian/Chilean parents, and is currently based in New York. He received a BA in Visual Arts and Philosophy from Columbia University in 2011 and attended the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Prof. Christopher Williams from 2015-6.

Olivares works in digital animation, sound sculpture and drawing to create psychologically charged environments that merge nature and technology. Mining impulses that reflect our deeply embedded fears and desires, Olivares abstracts them through digital interfaces. His work explores humanity through constantly evolving forms of image making, connecting viewers beyond an immediate time and place.

Olivares has exhibited in venues such as: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, The Clark Institute, Williamstown; Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Bortolami Gallery, New York; Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Off Vendome, New York; Aguirre, Mexico City; and M/L Artspace, Venice.

Collections: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaundengo, Torino, Italy; Adrastus Collection, Avila, Spain.

Slava Mogutin

Slava Mogutin is a New York-based Russian-American multimedia artist and author exiled from Russia for his outspoken writing and activism. Informed by his bicultural dissident and refugee experience, Mogutin’s work examines the notions of displacement and identity, pride and shame, devotion and disaffection, love and hate.

Born Yaroslav Yurievich Mogutin (Ярослав Юрьевич Могутин) in the industrial city of Kemerovo, Siberia, he left his family and moved to Moscow at age 14. A third-generation writer and self-taught journalist, he soon began working as a reporter and editor for the first independent Russian newspapers, publishers, and radio stations, such as Echo of Moscow, The Moscow Times, The Moscow Guardian, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Stolitsa, and Novy Vzglyad. He was hailed as one of the foremost voices of the post-Perestroika new journalism and the only openly gay personality in the Russian media.

By the age of 21, Mogutin had gained both critical acclaim and official condemnation and became the target of two highly publicized criminal cases, carrying a potential prison sentence of up to seven years. He was charged with “open and deliberate contempt for generally accepted moral norms,” “malicious hooliganism with exceptional cynicism and extreme insolence,” “inflaming social, national, and religious division,” “propaganda of brutal violence, psychic pathology, and sexual perversions.”

In 1994, Mogutin attempted to register officially the first same-sex marriage in Russia with his then-partner, American artist Robert Filippini. The attempt made headlines around the world, but only further fueled his persecution by the authorities. Forced to flee his country in 1995, Mogutin became the first Russian to be granted political asylum in the US on the grounds of homophobic persecution. His case for asylum was supported by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch/Helsinki, Committee to Protect Journalists, Article 19, PEN International and PEN American Center, setting the precedent for many other gay and lesbian refugees from the former USSR.

Upon his arrival in New York, Mogutin shifted his focus to visual art and started using his nickname Slava—"glory" or "fame" in Russian—as his artist name. His photography and multimedia work have been exhibited internationally, including MoMA PS1 and Museum of Arts and Design in New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; The Pacific Design Center in LA; Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam; Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen; Estonian KUMU Art Museum in Tallinn; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) in Spain; The Haifa Museum of Art in Israel, and, most recently, in his first US museum solo show at iMOCA, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art.

Mogutin's work was included in the program of the 1st Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2005), 15th Tallinn Print Triennial (2008), 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art and 56th La Biennale di Venezia, as part of Jaanus Samma's NSFW. A Chairman’s Tale at the Estonian Pavilion (2015). His photography has been published in a wide range of publications, including BUTT, Flash Art, Modern Painters, i-D, Dazed & Confused, Visionaire, L’Uomo Vogue, Stern, Libération, The Guardian, and The New York Times. He is a regular contributor to Gayletter, The Calvert Journal, Whitewall, Vice, Flaunt, The Stranger, and Document Journal.

Mogutin is the author of two critically acclaimed monographs of photography published in the US, Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go (powerHouse Books, Brooklyn, 2006/2008), and seven books of writings in Russian. In 2000, he was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in Russia. His poetry, fiction, essays, and interviews had appeared in numerous publications and anthologies in ten languages. He has translated into Russian selected writings of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Dennis Cooper.

Mogutin has lectured extensively throughout the US, including NYU, Columbia University, Yale, Harvard, Harriman Institute, Grinnell College, Stevens Institute of Technology, Middlebury College, University of Kansas, Parsons The New School for Design, and School of Visual Arts. As an actor he appeared in Bruce LaBruce’s film Skin Flick (1999) and Laura Colella’s independent feature Stay Until Tomorrow (2004). His commercial credentials include still photography for the HBO series Looking (2013), film commission for Please Do Not Enter (2014), collaborations with Gosha Rubchinskiy and Lotta Volkova (2016), CV22-Rugby (2017), Helmut Lang (2019), NIHL and Marni (2020), RASSVET, Dover Street Market Paris and Comme des Garçons Berlin (2021), Guram Gvasalia and VTMNTS (2022), as well as commission portraits and fashion editorials.

In 2011, Mogutin was naturalized as a US citizen and legally changed his name to Slava. He continues to write in Russian and English and remains a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin and his recent anti-gay policies. In 2014, Mogutin released his first collection of writings in English, Food Chain (ITNA Press, Brooklyn). His latest photography monograph, Bros & Brosephines, was published in 2017 by powerHouse Books, followed by the illustrated Straight to Hell edition, Pictures & Words (2018). He is currently at work on a bilingual collection of poetry, a book of essays and interviews covering over two decades of his journalistic work, Gay in the Gulag, and two books based on his analog and Polaroid photography.

Ryan McGinley

Ryan McGinley was born on October 17, 1977, in Ramsey, New Jersey. He received a BFA in graphic design at Parsons School of Design, New York, in 2000. That same year he staged his first solo show of photographs, The Kids Are Alright, inside an abandoned warehouse in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. He sent his self-published catalogue of the exhibition to curators, artists, and magazine editors he admired, and it garnered attention from Sylvia Wolf, a curator of photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Wolf championed his work, and in 2003, at 25 years of age, McGinley had an exhibition as part of the museum’s First Exposure series, making him the youngest artist ever to have a solo show at the institution.

McGinley gravitated to street culture early on in his adolescence and began hanging out with a band of self-proclaimed “outsiders”—skateboarders, club kids, graffiti artists, queer-identified youths, and indie musicians—in New Jersey and downtown Manhattan. What began as candid shots of his and his friends’ lifestyle are now seen as iconic snapshots of his generation. McGinley’s early photographs show beautiful, young, nude, and androgynous youth raving, getting high, skinny dipping, hanging precariously from rooftops, shoplifting, running, falling, cavorting, and living with hedonistic abandon, exuberance, and rebellion. McGinley’s friends are willing collaborators, keenly aware of the camera while displaying a candor and frankness that subvert the banality of their everyday lives as they help to create images that are powerful, enticing visions of a new-bohemian coterie.

Although they resonate with photographs by Nan Goldin and the films of Larry Clark and Gus Van Sant, McGinley’s works eschew the tragedy and impending doom his predecessors often conveyed in their depictions of marginalized subcultures. Instead, his photos suggest a glee and freedom in keeping with the quintessential notion of youth testing the boundaries of life. In his early works in particular, McGinley seems to evoke Dionysus—the god of wine, art, and ecstasy surrounded by naked, androgynous youths whom he liberates by allowing them to thwart convention and unselfconsciously indulge in pleasure.

McGinley’s work has evolved from making documentary photographs to orchestrating scenes where he directs people according to his creative vision. What began as a summer road trip to Vermont where he took photos of friends in the backwoods spawned several annual summer cross-country road trips. With the vast American landscape as the backdrop, Sun and Health (2006) shows his friends carefree while boating, rolling down sand dunes, and running through open fields. In I Know Where the Summer Goes (2008), his team gaily traverses nude across the great outdoors, and the scenes are aided by special effects such as fireworks and fog machines, which add a sense of surrealism to the photos. Moonmilk (2009) captures a group exploring America’s uncharted underground caves that drip with multicolored crystal deposits. For Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (2010), McGinley took intimate, high-gloss, digital black-and-white shots of mostly strangers, while Animals (2012) features portraits of wild animals paired with nude models against bright, sorbet-colored backgrounds. Yearbook (2014) retains the studio look of Animals, featuring over five hundred nude portraits, all with brightly colored, generic backdrops, installed to cover every inch of the gallery’s walls and ceiling.

McGinley has had solo exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), New York (2004); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2005); Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam (2007); Ratio 3, San Francisco (2010, 2013); and the Daelim Museum, Seoul (2013–14). Group exhibitions include those at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2004); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007); Brooklyn Museum (2009–10); and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2010). McGinley lives and works in New York.

Myles Loftin

Myles Loftin is an artist, storyteller, and creative collaborator based in Brooklyn but very much on the world’s radar. Brands like Calvin Klein, Converse, GCDS, Nike, and Under Armour commission him for ad campaigns, and publications like Paper, The Cut, Garage, i-D, and The Fader turn to him for editorials that resonate with discerning audiences. 

Myles’ work, known for an often playful sensibility and an intimacy that unite viewer and subject, is driven by his desire to show up for underrepresented and misrepresented groups—because as a queer Black man, he knows the power of visibility. “We look to the media for ideas of what our future can be,” says Myles, “and if you don’t see yourself represented, it’s very hard for you to imagine a future for yourself.”

A budding tastemaker, Myles was featured in the campaign “Polaroid Originals and Ryan McGinley Present the New Originals,” and he co-curated a panel for Parsons School of Design’s “Nth Degree Series” celebrating “thinkers, visionaries, and creators who define the cutting edge.” In 2019, at the age of 21, he was invited to speak at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The following year, Forbes named him one of 2020’s “30 Under 30” in the category of “Art and Style.” And this is just the beginning…

Papi Juice

Papi Juice is an art collective that aims to affirm and celebrate the lives of queer and trans people of color. structured around our curated events, papi juice lives at the intersection of art, music, and nightlife.

Since Papi Juice’s inception in 2013, the collective has been changing the face of nightlife in New York City and beyond with intentional platforms for artists of color including panels, workshops, artist residencies, performances, and, of course, fabled DJ sets and all night parties. Papi Juice has featured artists like: Princess Nokia, MikeQ, Kindness, Juliana Huxtable, Asmara, Helado Negro, and Bbymutha. Papi Juice has also partnered with institutions like: The Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, El Museo del Barrio, Creative Time, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Toronto Pride, Red Bull Music Academy, and many more.

Mohammed Fayaz is an illustrator and the art director of Papi Juice. Born and raised in New York City, Mohammed's illustrations are intent on documenting the lived experiences of his queer community. With work that spans digital and mixed media, his illustrations lend an eye into a world traditionally overlooked and underserved in the mainstream.

Adam Rhodes is an audio/video technologist, DJ, and one of the co-founders of Papi Juice. Adam’s music and digital art are inspired by his Caribbean and African-American heritage. His work reflects his interest in afro-futurism, afro-pessimism and the diaspora at large.

Oscar Nuñez is a NYC-based DJ and one of the co-founders of Papi Juice. His sound is a curated blend of global and virtual urban genres with a prominent queer sensibility. Currently, Oscar Nñ is focused on developing his sonic identity, creating mixes and DJing around NYC, with plans to produce his own sounds in the near future.

Oscar yi Hou

Oscar yi Hou is an artist and writer based in New York. He was born and raised in Liverpool, England. He received his B.A in Visual Art from Columbia University. He has also studied at the L’École des Arts de la Sorbonne. His work is anchored in personhood, pulling together a syncretic field of iconography that describes complex layers of identity and relation. Alongside his solo exhibition East of sun, west of moon at the Brooklyn Museum, yi Hou is recipient of the third annual UOVO Prize in 2022. In 2021 he presented A sky-licker relation and A dozen poem-pictures at James Fuentes, New York and JamesFuentes.Online, respectively. His work has also been included in exhibitions at the Royal Academy, UK; Asia Society, New York; T293 Gallery, Rome, Italy; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; and Sprüth Magers Online.

Thomas Allen Harris

Thomas Allen Harris is a critically acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist who explores family, identity, and spirituality in a participatory practice. Since 1990, Harris has remixed archives from multiple origins throughout his work, challenging hierarchy within historical narratives through the use of pioneering documentary and research methodologies that center vernacular image and collaboration. His television show Family Pictures USA, which takes a radical look at neighborhoods and cities of the United States through the lens of family photographs, collaborative performances, and personal testimony sourced from their communities, premiered on PBS in August, 2019 and was broadcast to 5.3 M viewers and critically well-received. 

In 2021, Harris launched the Family Pictures Institute for Inclusive Storytelling to spread the work he has been engaged in over the past 10+ years and expand upon it through robust research, evaluation, scholarly discussion and artistic interpretation. The Institute is funded by The Ford Foundation and others, and will be housed at Yale University.

Harris’ participatory practice grew out of deeply collaborative work he engaged in early in his career with a vanguard of queer filmmakers of color, including Cheryl Dunye, Yvonne Welbon, Raul Ferrera Balanquet, Shari Frilot, and Marlon Riggs. As a staff producer for WNET (New York’s PBS affiliate) on their show THE ELEVENTH HOUR, Harris produced Emmy nominated public television segments around HIV/AIDS activism and its intersection with the culture wars from 1987-1991. In 1990 he curated the first New York/San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Town Hall meeting, a three-hour public television event which culminated in the broadcast of Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. In 1997, Harris and 6 other queer filmmakers of color produced a document titled Narrating Our History: A Dialogue Among Queer Media Artists From the African Diaspora. This piece has been published in Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making (2018, ed. Yvonne Welbon and Alexandra Juhasz).

Harris’ deeply personal and experimental films have received critical acclaim at international film/art festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, Tribeca, FESPACO, Outfest, Flaherty, Cape Town, and the Melbourne Art Festival, and have broadcast on POV American documentary series on PBS, AfroPOP, the Sundance Channel, ARTE, as well as CBC, Swedish broadcasting Network, and New Zealand Television. The films include: Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela (2005), a story of the anti apartheid movement told through personal testimonies, archival material, and a cast of first time South African actors engaging with the archive; É Minha Cara/That’s My Face (2001), a mythopoetic journey shot completely on Super 8mm film by three generations of Harris’ family on three continents; and VINTAGE – Families of Value (1995), a mosaic portrait of Black families created by handing the camera to three groups of queer siblings, including Harris and his brother Lyle Ashton Harris. These films have re-interpreted the idea of documentary, autobiography, and personal archive through their innovative use of community participation.

In 2009, Harris and his team founded Digital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR), a transmedia project that explores and shares the rich and revealing narratives found within family photo albums. Working in partnership with museums, festivals, senior and youth centers, educational institutions, libraries, and cultural arts spaces, DDFR organizes workshops, performances, and exhibitions that create communal linkages affirming our common humanity while privileging the voices of people whose stories have often been absent, marginalized or overlooked. The DDFR archive has grown to include 3,500 interviews with people around their family photos and 50K+ photographs. The project was developed in tandem with Harris’ film Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, in which leading Black cultural figures, scholars, and photographers share their archives with Harris in an exploration of the ways photography has been used as a tool of representation and self-representation in history. The film premiered on Independent Lens on PBS in 2015 and was nominated for a National Emmy and a Peabody Award. The film won the 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary film, the Fund for Santa Barbara Social Justice Award, and an Africa Movie Academy Award, among others.

A graduate of Harvard College, the Whitney Museum of American Arts Independent Study Program, and the CPB/PBS Producers Academy, Harris is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artist Award, Rockefeller Fellowship, Sundance Director & Producer Fellowships, a Dartmouth College Montgomery Fellowship, and Independent Spirit Award nomination. A published photographer, curator, and writer with a broad background of community organizing in a socially engaged film/art practice, Harris lectures widely on visual literacy and the use of media as a tool for social change and is on faculty at Yale University. His media appearances include C-Span, NPR, Metrofocus, AriseTV, a TEDx Talk, articles detailing his work from Yale Maquette and Truth in Photography, and keynote presentations at Frank Gathering 2020, the North Carolina Network of Grantmakers 2020 Annual Meeting and Conference, and the 2020 Florida Philanthropic Network Statewide Summit on Philanthropy, where the Family Pictures USA methodology is being used to create change in the philanthropic world as well as in leadership training programs.

Lyle Ashton Harris

Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic.

Harris has been widely exhibited internationally, including most recently in “Photography’s Last Century” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; in “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story’’ and “Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; in “United by AIDS” at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; in “Kiss My Genders” at the Haywood Gallery, London; in “Tell Me Your Story” at Kunsthal KaDE, Amersfoort, NL; in “Elements of Vogue” at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid (traveled to Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City). Harris’s work was included in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), the Busan Biennial, South Korea (2008), the Bienal de São Paulo (2016), the Whitney Biennial (2017), and presented by Cinéma Du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018). 

Harris is represented in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annendale-on-Hudson, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Tate Modern, London, UK; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland, among others.

Harris has also presented performances at a range of venues, most recently at Volksbühne Grüner Salon sponsored by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2019); a lecture/performance on Andy Warhol presented by the DIA Art Foundation, New York (2018); and an installation/performance at Participant Inc., New York (2018); and a lecture/performance on experimentation, politics and sexuality in the work of filmmaker Marlon T. Riggs at Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver BC, Canada (2020).

Harris received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2016), the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2014), and the Rome Prize Fellowship (2000) among other awards and honors. Harris joined the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome in 2014 and was appointed a trustee of the Tiffany Foundation in 2016.

Born in the Bronx, New York, raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and New York, Harris obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University, a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. His work is available from the following fine art galleries: Salon 94 (New York, NY, USA); David Castillo (Miami, FL, USA); Albert Merola Gallery (Provincetown, MA, USA); Maruani Mercier (Brussels, BE). Harris is a Professor of Art at New York University and lives in New York.

Drake Carr

Drake Carr was born in 1993 in Flint, MI, and currently lives and works in New York City, NY. The artist received a BA in Graphic Design from Eastern Michigan University in 2015. Attuned to the diverse contexts in which he creates, Carr employs drawing, painting, and collage, approaching his practice with a versatility that encompasses commissioned portraits drawn in the intimate settings of subjects’ homes, paintings that oscillate between fine art and decoration in the gritty and communal atmosphere of a Bushwick dive bar, and immersive live drawing residencies spanning multiple weeks. Inspired by the fashion illustrators of the 1970s and ’80s like Antonio Lopez, he works with his subjects to style and pose them in dynamic ways. In all of his work, Carr paints a portrait of the communities he moves through that is simultaneously humorous and earnest, exaggerated and true-to-life.

Carr has been drawing since childhood, a practice that informs all aspects of his work and in 2022, the artist took up live drawing. Over the course of a two-week residency hosted by New York Life Gallery, Carr produced 150 portraits of invited subjects ranging from fixtures of New York City nightlife to mavens of the fashion industry, a curated selection of which comprised the resulting exhibition, entitled Walk-ins (2023). He first introduced painting to his practice when he was commissioned to create new works for the walls of Happyfun Hideaway, a queer bar in Brooklyn, NY. This commission saw the emergence of Carr’s distinctive ‘cutouts’ — paintings in which he uses gesture, pose, and style to build a world for his characters, as in Formal Occasion (2023), wherein silhouettes dressed in ball gowns and coattails strike glamorous poses on the walls of the bar. Adopting the bar as a personal gallery, Carr’s cutouts have continued to grace the walls of Happyfun Hideaway, offering the artist an opportunity to observe how patrons engage with his work. For Carr, the act of creation is often importantly linked to the notion of providing a service, be it through his commissioned works for shops or bars or his commissioned portraits that capture the character of his subjects.

At the heart of Carr’s artistic vision is a profound appreciation for fashion and style, which he integrates into his work by carefully curating specific looks with his sitters or by drawing inspiration from eclectic garments — a stranger’s ripped-up jeans or too-tight tube top — that he encounters on the streets of New York City. These carefully chosen sartorial elements adorn the characters, ranging from his closest companions to the whimsical figments of his own invention, that inhabit his creative universe. Throughout his work, the artist skillfully renders portraits that balance beauty and parody, tenderly poking fun at his own communities. “I like having this ironic, funny, tacky, ugly, annoying thing,” says Carr, “but then bring it around so that at some point there’s a meaningfulness, that’s hard to put words to but is heartfelt.”