Lyle Ashton Harris’s Scrapbooks of the Self

The exhibition’s catalogue includes an appendix of a hundred and nine separate elements of the “Shadow Works” collages, each annotated, some by Harris himself, who remembers when and where he made or acquired a particular image. Some of the notes read like diary entries describing brief encounters, romantic hookups, and first connections with new friends. In between these more personal notations, Harris includes news clippings and magazine covers about Abu Ghraib, the Pulse night-club massacre, a police shooting caught on camera, a Ta-Nehisi Coates portrait commission, a Jack Pierson show announcement, and a postcard of Warhol’s Liz. Detailing the contents of the “Shadow Works” collages doesn’t really demystify them, but it does allow us access to a certain slice of Harris’s brain—and to the obsessiveness involved in inventorying it all.