Portraiture: A Private Room: Luis Flores, Katy Grannan, Lyle Ashton Harris, Meleko Mokgosi, Robert Pruitt, Timothy Washington, and Richard Wyatt Jr.

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. Portraiture is a tool Harris uses to question, declare, and provoke — together calling attention to the construction of image and selfhood while underscoring the life of his subjects. This selection presents a broad range of Harris’s works including Coquette, 1987-1988 and Maine #1, 1987-1988 which are part of his seminal series Americas and Reflection of Past Life through Glass, Zamble at Land's End #2, 2018, where Harris returns to self-portraiture in his Flash of the Spirit series, and Harris’s unique polaroid Billie #1, 2002, which depicts the artist in drag dressed as Billie Holiday in handcuffs.

Robert Pruitt works in a variety of materials, with the focus of his practice centered on rendering large scale figurative portraits. He projects into those images a juxtaposing series of experiences and material references, denoting a diverse and radical black past, present, and future.  Pruitt often utilizes religion, spirituality, signs, and symbolic objects throughout his work as a means of exploring an African-American conception of transcendence and mythology. 

Katy Grannan, originally from Arlington, MA, discovered a passion for photography early in life, after her grandmother gave her a Kodak Instamatic 124. She never aspired to be an artist until she discovered Robert Frank and his indelible photographs in The Americans. This work changed her life. Grannan was first recognized for an intimate series of portraits depicting strangers she met through newspaper advertisements. 

Katy Grannan's new portraits take us to the Blackfeet Nation, where family members and the extended tribe remember those who have disappeared.  Here, she attempts to picture what cannot be seen — absence, injustice and loss, and the enduring legacies of countless missing women.  Katy Grannan's new series of portraits of Blackfeet women are part of an ongoing collaboration with the tribe to produce a series of photographs, films and individual recordings. Countless Natives have disappeared within vast and remote reservations in the United States and Canada. Exact numbers are unknown because there are no reliable statistics. No one is counting the missing.

Luis Flores works in a multitude of mediums from sculpture to performance, photography, and drawing. His life-sized figure sculptures are made entirely by hand, crocheted and constructed, existing as his personal doppelgangers, their arms and legs arranged in various choreographed positions, alone or in  play with additional Luis Flores bodies. This humorous and provocative type of self-portraiture conflates notions of masculinity and pre-conceived expectations of materiality. In Flores's life-sized self-portrait drawings, a single charcoal line outlines his naked body. By covering his genitalia with an additional self-portrait, Flores again draws attention to the complexities of the language of gender and masculinity.