Kira Lynn Harris

Education

Harris was born in Los Angeles. She received her BA in Studio Art from the University of California at Santa Cruz and then her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1998.

Career

In addition to multiple solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Italy, Canada, and South Africa, Harris has also served as artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001-2002), the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2004), St. Mary's College of Maryland (2005), Omi International Art Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art (2006). Her work has been exhibited at many galleries, including MoMA PS1, Miami Art Museum, Bruno Marina Gallery, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. She has participated in the following group exhibitions: Blues for Smoke (MoCA and Whitney Museum), Black Light (White Noise Contemporary Art Museum and Freestyle Studio Museum Harlem).

Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. Critics have described her work as "minimal," making use of installation, drawing, photography, and video to express "formal concerns of space, light and the phenomenological with issues of individual subjectivity." Of her work, Harris explains, "My projects often provide a disorienting encounter for the viewer: in my installations I am concerned with destabilization and re-orientation. To achieve this I often create architectural and environmental interventions – by using light and reflective surfaces; by inverting subject and object or figure and ground; and/or by reversing up and down, exterior and interior."

Harris has stated that her work is influenced by artists like James Turrell, Mark Rothko, and the Hudson River School painters; she also explained, "A lot of my interest in light came from being from Los Angeles, where the light is just everywhere. You have these huge expanses of sky.”

Works

Prizes and Awards

In 1998 Harris won the Lorser Feitelson Emerging Artist award. In 2003 she won the Harvestworks artist-in-residence video production grant.

Personal life

Kira now resides in New York City and teaches art for high schoolers and college students. She has been an Assistant Professor at John Jay College and Art Faculty at Nightingale-Bamford School.