Whit Harris is a multi-disciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, and ceramic media. Her work features representations of the dissoluted experience through disjointed depictions of the human body. Figures stretch, recline, wriggle, twerk and otherwise contort themselves in exaggerated expressions that oscillate between naturalistic and cartoonish forms, and recall the DuBoisian premise of “double consciousness” underlying contemporary Black identity. These figures become metaphors for the artist’s psychological adaptation to unpredictable and hostile environments borne out of anti-black social structures, and reflect the tenacity and ingenuity of Black femme imagination as political resistance.
Born and raised in New York City, Whit Harris received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) 2024 fellowship in painting. She has presented solo exhibitions at Peninsula, New York (2024); and Lauren Powell Projects, Los Angeles (2022); and has participated in group exhibitions at Brooklyn College, Brooklyn; Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich; Hauser & Wirth, DIMIN, JDJ, My Pet Ram, and Swivel Gallery in New York. Harris currently has work at The Umbrella Art Center in Massachusetts. Harris is represented by DIMIN and currently serves as Adjunct Professor at Brooklyn College. She holds an MFA from Hunter College, New York.