Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

ICA Miami presents “Ektachrome Archive,” a seminal body of work by New York-based artist Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965, Bronx, New York; lives in New York).

Comprising thirty-six documentary photographs and fifteen journals dating from the early 1990s, the installation chronicles the emergence of a new generation of Black cultural producers and scholars in the wake of the Black Arts Movement and the conservative turn of the 1980s, and amid a continuing AIDS epidemic. Among the figures prominent in these documents are late filmmaker Marlon Riggs, curator Thelma Golden, activist scholars bell hooks and Michele Wallace, and artists Glenn Ligon, Gary Simmons, and Carrie Mae Weems.

The archive documents critical events that initiated the emergence of radical thinking and artistic work in Black studies and Black cultural production in the mid-1990s, such as the Black Popular Culture and Black Nations/Queer Nations? conferences. It also presents institutional and academic spaces that hosted significant Black artists, such as the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which Harris attended in 1992. This archive and the moment it documents are the bedrock—too often neglected or underappreciated—of a great deal of thinking that informs today’s activism and critical perspectives of race, gender, and inclusion.

“Ektachrome Archive” is the first project in a new initiative by ICA Miami inviting artists to engage in dialogue with Robert Gober’s Untitled (1994–95), on long-term view on the museum’s ground floor. Dedicated to the exchange of art and ideas, these exhibitions promote dynamic and complex discussions among artistic practices.

“Ektachrome Archive” by Lyle Ashton Harris is organized by ICA Miami and curated by Gean Moreno, Director of the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center