Third Text

Theodore A Harris is a Philadelphia-based visual artist and poet, working in the intersection of art and politics. Harris is the founder and director of The Institute for Advanced Study in Black Aesthetics. He has co-authored many books, including Our Flesh of Flames (2019), Malcolm X as Ideology (2008) with Amiri Baraka, TRIPTYCH with Amiri Baraka and Jack Hirschman (2011), and I ran from it and was still in it with Fred Moten (2007). Another recent publication, Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Formalism (2017) includes a series of artworks and poetry that challenges mainstream art criticism and art history. Theodore Harris’s work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in private and public collections, such as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Center for Africana Studies, the W E B Du Bois College House, the University of Pennsylvania, the Saint Louis University Museum of Art, and the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art.

August 2021

From ‘Collage and Conflict: A Triptych Manifesto’

As an artist I create work to act as a lobbyist for liberation, not to hold up oppressive regimes and an oligarchy that resolves conflict with sanctions and nooses of war and enters into a concordat with the church that put silencers on crucifixion nails. The existence of Arlington National Cemetery and the prison industrial complex is evidence enough that the scales of justice are not blind and even. Those graves are not filled with blue bloods but fresh with our dead, the working poor in this country, deployed to go off and kill the working poor in another country like drones. This is proof that the business class only sees life through the narrow profit margin eyeglasses of mercantilism. It is with these conclusions that I see war as a map of wounds; turning flesh and bones into glue. This is the reason the protagonists in these confrontational collages are inverted images of the US Capitol and Pentagon buildings, intended to be read as an invective and a critique of blind patriotism.

Vetoed Dreams, 1995, mixed media collage on board, 4 x 6 in (10 x 15.3 cm), collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

End this War... after Shirley Chisholm, from the ‘Collage and Conflict’ series, 2008, triptych, mixed media collage on board, each panel 9 x 11 in (23 x 28 cm), courtesy of the artist

Postcard from Conquest, from the ‘Collage and Conflict’ series, 2008, triptych, mixed media collage on board, each panel 9 x 11 in (23 x 28 cm), collection of Beatrice Jauregui and Anand Rao
 

War is the Sound of Money Eating, after John G Hall, from the ‘Collage and Conflict’ series, 2008, triptych, mixed media collage on board, each panel 10 x 14 in (25.5 x 35.5 cm), collection of Roland Reed

Don't Shoot the Caregivers, from the ‘Collage and Conflict’ series, 2008, triptych, mixed media collage on board, each panel 9 x 11 in (23 x 28 cm), courtesy of the artist

Purple Hearts Bleed, from the ‘Collage and Conflict’ series, 2008, triptych, mixed media collage on board, 14 x 18 in, 14 x 10 in, 14 x 18 in   (35.5 x 45.7 cm, 35.5 x 25.5 cm, 35.5 x 45.7 cm), collection of Winston and Carolyn Lowe

The End... Reagan’s Casket, from the ‘Collage and Conflict’ series, 2008, triptych, mixed media collage on board, each panel 10 x 14 in (25.5 x 35.5 cm), courtesy of the artist

From ‘Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Formalism’

This series of minimal image and quotation-based works uses poetry to confront mainstream art criticism and art history, to look beneath the surface politics of aesthetics and formalism. Formalism functions as the cosmetics of art criticism, like aluminum siding on a slumlord’s property. It is an attempt to disguise what is crumbling beneath the surface politics of its proselytizing church bells ringing in the megachurch / the museums and galleries, where there are more Black bodies guarding the white cube than exhibiting in it. In every Thesentür work you are confronted with the men in Rembrandt's Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers' Guild from 1662, facing us like celluloid ghosts from art history's past.

After Brian Winkenweder, from the ‘Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Fomalism’ series, 2020, digital image on paper, 46 x 29 in (117 x 73.7 cm), courtesy of the artist
 

After Kirsten Pai Buck (ghost), from the ‘Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Fomalism’ series, 2020, digital image on paper, 46 x 29 in (117 x 73.7 cm), courtesy of the artist

After David Craven (ghost), from the ‘Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Fomalism’ series, 2020, digital image on paper, 46 x 29 in (117 x 73.7 cm), courtesy of the artist

The artist dedicates this Art Space contribution to the late art historian David Lee Craven, who wrote many essays in Third Text. David Craven was Distinguished Professor at the University of New Mexico and passed away in 2012. In his lifetime, Craven wrote more than fifteen monographs and exhibition catalogues on such diverse topics as Diego Rivera, Abstract Expressionism, Rudolf Baranik, and art associated with Latin American revolutions. In addition to being a dedicated professor and inspirational lecturer, he published over 150 essays, articles and reviews in such academic journals as Art History and Kritische Berichte, as well as magazines like Arts Magazine and Tema Celeste, among others. His writing also appeared in anthologies, encyclopaedias and newspapers.