YALE MFA 25’

Erol Scott Harris is a multidisciplinary artist who creates identity-based work. Currently living in Chicago, Illinois, he is a farmer boy who was born in the north suburbs in Waukegan, Illinois.  Harris studied painting and comes from a music background, having played cello for many years. Collaboration is a big part of his work and combining painting and performance has also become increasingly important to him, as have curating and art advising.

For Harris, painting/art is an arena in which to uncover how he can work with the body—his own and others’.His painting process involves setting up a series of potentials in which he becomes free to move with them by performing, by using his physical form. He also incorporates photography as a way of maintaining the presence of his body through time and space. His interest is in what is left after his body is no longer performing. Once the paint has absorbed his energy, what remains are traces of his body; the remnants are relics that still breathe.

“I’ve come to realize that while I continue to exist and develop as an individual, my whole self, or soul, has such vast potential, that it can never be expressed fully through a lifetime. My work is to intimately document the multitudinous array of myselves falling into subjecthood, as they dissolve, evolve and reverberate in my imagination.”