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Can you name five women artists? Since 2016, the National Museum of Women in the Arts has been asking this question on social media each March during Women's History Month using the hashtag…#5WomenArtists 2020: Carla Jay Harris
Artist Carla Jay Harris. Courtesy the artist
Can you name five women artists?
Since 2016, the National Museum of Women in the Arts has been asking this question on social media each March during Women's History Month using the hashtag #5WomenArtists. The campaign calls attention to the fact that women have historically not been treated equally in the art world, and remain dramatically underrepresented and undervalued in today's museums, galleries, and auction houses.
Black women are doubly underrepresented in this context, often absent from America's museums and erased from the art world's memory. To address these disparities, CAAM will be sharing biographies of five women artists who have shown at the museum.
Carla Jay Harris
Carla Jay Harris is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes photography, installation, collage, and drawing. She completed her undergraduate coursework at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and earned a bachelor's degree with distinction from the University of Virginia. She also holds an MFA from UCLA and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Harris' work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Granada, and Quebec. Her 2019 print Sphinx is part of the CAAM exhibition Sanctuary: Recent Acquisitions to the Permanent Collection.
(image: sactuaryweb.jpg)
Sphinx, 2019
Archival pigment print, two panels, 40 x 30 in. each
Courtesy the artist
Harris was born in Indianapolis to a military family and grew up traveling the globe. The varied geopolitical and natural environments she encountered as a child had a tremendous impact on her social and artistic development, and Harris believes that physical and physiological space have a fundamental effect on personal identity.
Harris trained as a photographer and describes photography as a way to "transform a flicker in time into a lasting, appreciable statement," this even as the world is in constant evolution.
(image: screen-shot-2020-03-29-at-8.04.58-pm.png)
Elemental Beings, 2014
Photograph
Courtesy the artist
(image: screen-shot-2020-03-29-at-7.59.36-pm.png)
Carla Jay Harris and Brenda E. Stevenson
Bitter Earth, 2018 (installation detail)
Wallpaper
Courtesy Carla Jay Harris
"My mission is to document intellectual, emotional, and psychological environments," says Harris. "Conceptually, I start each project with an aspect of my own personal experience that I want to explore; then, evolve the work into a lasting statement on human nature. I describe the end-style of my work as narrative with a hint of fantasy. Often archival and found materials from my research make it into my final works. The mixture of archival, documented, and imagined imagery allows me to transgress unwritten social laws and encourage viewers to look differently and imaginatively at their own existence."
Visit Carla Jay Harris' website or follow her on Instagram.
<strong>#5WomenArtists 2020</strong>