THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. Theodore A. Harris

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#20, SEPT-NOV/2024

Theodore A. Harris is a Philadelphia-based visual artist/poet and is the Founding Artistic Director of The Institute for Advanced Study in Black Aesthetics.  He is a 2022 CFEVA Visual Artist Fellow (Center for Emerging Visual Artists).  Harris co-founded the Anti-Graffiti Network/Philadelphia Mural Arts Program.  Harris has also co-authored and authored books including Our Flesh of Flames (2019), Malcolm X as Ideology (2008) with Amiri Baraka, TRIPTYCH with Amiri Baraka and Jack Hirschman (2011), i ran from it and was still in it with Fred Moten (2007), and Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Formalism (2017).

His forthcoming exhibition is Thesentür/The Thinker: Nina Simone and the Politics of Music at the Center For Emerging Visual Artists Gallery in Philadelphia, and will run from November to December, 2024.

Brotherwise Dispatch - What does it mean to assert that “as an artist I create work to act as a lobbyist for liberation”?

Theodore A. Harris – As a collagist I put together images that you never see together to create a third meaning so here I'm collaging with words.  Lobbyist and liberation, the last thing a lobbyist wants is liberation, but here I'm using the word lobbyist to say that my work is meant to deregulate anti-intellectualist corporations with oxymoronic metaphors.

Theodore A. Harris, The Capitol Vetoed (1995-2023), mixed media collage printed on paper. Collection of Julia Ingersoll and David Castro

BD - By describing your work as “anti-imperialist collage”, in what sense does this speak to your Art as not just social praxis, but as emancipatory aesthetics in relation to the way it both resists and transcends the Real of a western imperialist continuum?

TH – Because the western visual art cannon is built on imperialist profits from the enslavement of Africans and uses art to try to intellectualize the lies it's telling us like the paintings in the US Capitol rotunda which is among other reasons the image of it is inverted in my collages, so my work is anti-imperialist because it is anti that, it is anti formalist.  I'm not nationalist because I don't care if you're a Black African dictator pimpin' your own people and the land for western capitalist interest or Zionist nazi, imperialism is imperialism, it sticks a flexible straw in your veins and drinks your blood like the bottomless belly of settler colonialism.

 

 Theodore A. Harris, Collage for a Phoney War, 2023, paper collage. Collection Saint Louis University Museum of Art 

 

BD -What kinds of questions about the human condition exemplified through lived Black experience do you feel or hope your Art incites?

TH – For Black people and other marginalized groups, what they bring upon viewing my work is that persons own lived experience up until that moment some the only thing I can hope the work incites is the viewer reflecting on their own lives because the form and content, because what my aims are as an artist are to push the form further and at the same create content to hold up a mirror that you may or may not recognize.

 

 BD -You mention a variety of influences on the aesthetic trajectory of your work, ranging from Romare Bearden and Pablo Picasso to Amiri Baraka and Pablo Neruda among others.  How would you describe this unity of visual potentialities and poetic possibility that is disclosed through the creative tension of your Art?

TH – I study the work of these artists because of the high standard they set. The only one I knew personally was my friend and collaborator Amiri Baraka, we co-authored a few books but the first is a book titled Our Flesh of Flames: Collages by Theodore A. Harris and Captions by Amiri Baraka. I learned a lot from the captions Baraka wrote to my collages.  The book will be reprinted in a few months by Willow Books updated with a new preface by Fred Moten and I would like to encourage anyone reading this interview to watch the video from the first presentation Baraka and I delivered at Haverford College. After Baraka reads two poems he then reads the captions he wrote to the collages as the images are projected.

Check out what he says between reading the captions Poet, AMIRI BARAKA and visual artist, Theodore A. Harris - YouTube

Cover Our Flesh Of Flames: Collages by Theodore A. Harris and Captions by Amiri Baraka (Anvil Arts Press/Moonstone Press) 2019

BD - As a creative response of human ‘being’ to the call of the disaster of history, how does your Art give voice to the Blues metaphysics as radical potentialities for a new beginning in our contemporary world?

TH – If I'm understanding you correctly we have to know what we are building our foundation on in order to build a new structure and that requires constant study of who we are, what we want, where are going, and how we get there using art as our weapon.

BD – This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.

On behalf of Theodore A. Harris and THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,

Peace.

-A. Shahid Stover

  

(this interview of Theodore A. Harris for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from December 18th – December 20^th, 2023.)