Tate Photography: Lyle Ashton Harris

New York-based artist Lyle Ashton Harris spent his adolescence living between New York City and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.This formative period informs his wide-ranging artistic practice in photography, collage, installation and performance — making a commentary on the societal constructs of gender, desire, and race; the complexities of African and African American experience; and his own identity as a queer, Black man. "I think it's important to talk about the triumph of laying claim to an experience and rechannelling its energy into creative expression that will go back out into the culture where an intergenerational transmission can take place."