This provided a safe space for the brothers to experiment with gender and their own personal sexual identity, something they feel is crucial to their artistic development.
In Amsterdam, Harris discovered a book by Allan Sekula, “Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works” that he believes drastically altered his ideas of self-development, changing the course of his life.
[4] Scholars, Kwame Appiah and Cassandra Coblentz, view “Americas” as Harris’ discovery of both his voice as an artist, and as a man, while toying with blackface in reverse.
Constructs furthered the ideas of his previous work “Americas”, as he aimed to showcase what it means to be a queer black man and accentuated the connection between sexuality and race.
[4] In 1994, Harris was offered a solo exhibition in New York City by Jack Tilton featuring his earlier work, “Constructs”, as part of the larger exhibition titled “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” Educator, Senam Okudzeto, considered Harris’ work a marriage of the autobiographical and the historiographical, beautifully illustrating “identity politics”.
Harris dresses up in feminine costumes, challenging every construct of black macho, while Hendricks' dated, once fashionable portraits - a sports figure, a man in a fancy, full-length coat - support the pillars of masculinity...".
[9] One of the most notable works from the show is a triptych series in collaboration with his brother, Thomas Allen Harris, entitled "Brotherhood, Crossroads, Etcetera".
The work weaves a complex visual allegory that invokes ancient African cosmologies, Judeo-Christian myths, and taboo public and private desires.
[12] “The Watering Hole” was inspired by the criminal case involving Jeffrey Dahmer, a cannibalistic killer who had victims that were majority black and Latino boys.
He used newspaper clippings relevant to the case and incorporated his own photographs to create a collage that showed the transparency between men and their masculine identities.
According to a Holland Cotter, a Pulitzer prize winning art critic, the title refers to "both to the city and to Marguerite Yourcenar's book of the same name, a fictional autobiography of the aging Roman emperor.".
The publication is the most definitive documentation of Harris' "Chocolate-Colored" portraits made with a large-format Polaroid camera over the past ten years.
[22] Harris also co-curated with Robert Storr and Peter Benson Miller a group exhibition Nero su Bianco (Black on White), which was presented at the American Academy in Rome in 2015.
[36] Through New York University's Global Program, between the years of 2005 and 2012, Harris taught in Accra, Ghana, and created work inspired by the political unrest surrounding visibility for the homosexual community.
This interconnectivity of culture is exemplified by Harris’ interpretation of a photo taken of Italian politician, Silvio Berlusconi, that was featured in the New York Times in the early 2000s.
Harris layered the photo with motifs of from Ghanaian funerary clothe and Java prints to represent the history of trade between Dutch and West Africa.
Throughout his works “Jamestown Prison Erasure,” 2010, and “Untitled,” he uses translucent fabrics and shadowy figures to represent the invisibility of the LGBTQ community in Accra, and the ongoing presence of racist structures passed down from the transatlantic slave trade.
James Smalls refers to Harris’ self-portraits as photography that engages in investigations of social issues with a focus on disguise and masquerade on the surface.