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Oral History Interview with Lyle Ashton Harris, 2017 March 27-29

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Oral History Interview with Lyle Ashton Harris, 2017 March 27-29 Oral history interview with Lyle Ashton Harris, 2017 March 27-29 Funded by the Keith Haring Foundation. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Lyle Ashton Harris on March 27 and 29, 2017. The interview took place at the studio of Lyle Ashton Harris in New York City, NY, and was conducted by Alex Fialho for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project. Lyle Ashton Harris and Alex Fialho have reviewed the transcript. Their corrections and emendations appear below in brackets with initials. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview ALEX FIALHO: This is Alex Fialho interviewing Lyle Ashton Harris for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art's Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic Oral History Project, on March 27, 2017, at Lyle's artist studio in Chelsea, New York. Lyle, thank you for this project. LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: Welcome. ALEX FIALHO: So let's start at the beginning. When and where were you born, and tell me a little bit about your childhood. LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: Oh, okay. I was born in the Bronx in 1965, and February 6, 1965. And what else? ALEX FIALHO: Tell me a little bit about your childhood. LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: Okay, my childhood. So basically, I was—my parents were still together when I was born. I think my father—my parents separated, I believe, in '71, '72. That would have made me seven, but clearly there was some, you know—like, I have very little memories of the time with him as a child. But I always say that I had a happy childhood. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. My mother was a chemistry professor, and she—so it was—spent a lot of time with my grandparents, as well as family gatherings. From a young age, I guess I had a certain sense that I might have been, you know, queer or different. Or just different. I was, I guess, up until—I would say I lived, up until, I would say, I was—up until I was, let's say, nine, I lived in the Bronx, and we had a—I would say it was probably a normal childhood. I have one brother, Thomas, filmmaker, and he's two and half years older than I am. I was—I wouldn't say I was quiet, but I also had a lot of friends. I was very—I guess I had friends. I definitely had friends, was close to my grandparents. And what else? When I was nine, I moved with my mother and my brother to Tanzania after my parents were divorced, and I lived there for a couple of years. ALEX FIALHO: Tell me a little bit more about your grandparents and their histories in New York. LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: My grandfather is from Albany [NY]. His father was—I should know this—his father was the personal messenger to the governor of New York, and he is from Albany. And my grandfather was the eldest of, let's say, five—I think—yeah, I think five siblings, and his father was a sergeant. And so it was basically a working, middle class, you know, family. Religious, very spiritual, AME—African Methodist Episcopal—very family-orientated, I guess—yeah, progressive educators. And my grandfather was a very brilliant man who, you know, as a child, he always told us the story of walking 10 miles to go to school and he—his mother did not work. His mother, well, basically she took care of the family, and so they lived in Albany, New York. ALEX FIALHO: Maternal or paternal grandfather? LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: This is my maternal grandfather. My maternal grandmother was from Charleston, South Carolina, and she came up to New York because her brother had—older brother—had come up several years, a few years before. And he—I think he was—he had fell down the elevator shaft, so she came up to help him recuperate from his accident. And so I think she came up when she was 13. And I think in the—in 1930—but she came when she was 13. I think she came out when she was 13, so maybe 10 years later, she met my grandfather at Bethel AME Church in Harlem, where they married in 19—in '32—in 1932 and— ALEX FIALHO: What were their names? LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: Albert Johnson Senior, and my grandmother's name was Joella Johnson. And there have been like four, yeah, three or four generations of, you know, Johnsons who attended this particular church, starting with them. My grandfather came to NYU; it was—through his father, he was offered—through the governor of New York was offered a full scholarship to go to Dartmouth, but he did not feel like going—being in an environment where he would be, you know, among very wealthy, you know, socially not being able, you know, just to—he made the option, the choice that it was more prudent to come to New York and work part-time and go to work, and then go to school part-time once you did NYU, where he earned a master's degree, you know, started with the bachelor then the master's degree— ALEX FIALHO: Great. LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: —and eventually went back and got his Ph.D. ALEX FIALHO: In? LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: In religious studies, but this is as a retiree. ALEX FIALHO: Wow. LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: And, yeah, so he and my grandmother, obviously, were very, very close. They raised three daughters. All three, you know, got master's degrees. They're very connected to the family. It was very much around, you know, education. About, you know, service to the church, service to the community. My grandfather was a race man. He was a—meaning, he was a race man. He was clearly a student of [W. E. B] Du Bois and also, you know, just very much conscious around Africa, et cetera. He never traveled to Africa, and that was a dream that my mother fulfilled for him when she went there for the first time in '71 with her close friend, to pave the road to take us there two years later. ALEX FIALHO: I was reading that they were photographed by James Van Der Zee. LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: Yeah, my grandparents were in photographs taken by Van Der Zee. ALEX FIALHO: Do you know the story behind how that came to be? LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: I actually don't. But, I mean, what's brilliant about, you know, Van Der Zee—because I think—obviously, thank Deb Willis for the extraordinary scholarship she's done in Van Der Zee—but what I like about the photograph, it definitely speaks to the vernacular, because although now it's obviously considered, you know, has a certain aura in terms of being, a Van Der Zee, which is a Modernist, you know, photographer, exemplary photographer, and the chronicle of the Harlem Renaissance, et cetera, they were—and to the black bourgeoisie—but he also documented, you know, so many different extraordinary scenes, historical scenes from, you know, from Marcus Garvey to the beauty queens of Harlem, just, you know, black life. And—but the photograph of me, when I think of the photograph, I mean, obviously, it has an aura of being a Van Der Zee, but it's also—it speaks to the fact that how he was—well, a couple things. My grandfather clearly was— he was super-savvy, you know, super-smart, and in a very subtle way. But he must have—I think he was aware that Van Der Zee or [Austin] Hansen, you know, who was another leading photographer, African-American photographer, like, in the '30s, '40s, and '50s, I believe. So he clearly was the studio to go to, yeah. ALEX FIALHO: How about your paternal grandparents? Do you know much about them? LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: I don't know much about—I knew my paternal—my father, my biological father, is second —his grandparents are from St. Kitts, which I actually went to, I think about 10 years ago. I don't know the exact date I went. But they left around the turn of the century, and so my paternal father was a third-generation immigrant, and there was a—I met his mother, Nanna Harris. I did not meet—and I also met his grandma. I met his grandmother. I'm forgetting her name right now. But I did not meet their husbands. ALEX FIALHO: How about your relationship to your mother? Tell me a little bit more about that, please. LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: My mother and I—now, or then, or when? ALEX FIALHO: Then. LYLE ASHTON HARRIS: We had a very—I would say we had a very close relationship, at times symbiotic. My mother's a super-intelligent, beautiful woman who was very race conscious but also—was super beautiful, but also sort of a woman ahead of her time in terms of being progressive, and also following the footsteps of her father. He was very into education but also interested in black consciousness, and in a more broad sense in terms of interests in Africa, so there was definitely growing up in a family of carrying that tradition.
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