Artist Spotlight | Carla Jay Harris

This month’s LA Art artist spotlight is on Carla Jay Harris and her magical ability to create fantastical, yet intimately familiar, works.
This month’s LA Art artist spotlight is on Carla Jay Harris and her magical ability to create fantastical, yet intimately familiar, works.

This month’s LA Art artist spotlight is on Carla Jay Harris.

Receiving her MFA from UCLA, Carla Jay Harris has continued to grace Los Angeles with her artwork since she completed her graduate degree. Harris has proliferately shown both locally and globally, in solo exhibitions and group shows. What makes Harris so special is her magical ability to create fantastical (and yet intimately familiar) works. These art pieces feel as though they’re fables, and we’re familiar with the characters and landscapes. 

This month’s LA Art artist spotlight is on Carla Jay Harris and her magical ability to create fantastical, yet intimately familiar, works.

Using a combination of photography, her own unique digital painting method, and acrylic, Harris stuns with large format artworks which are accessible across an array of viewers. Harris is a trained photographer, but has recently created a new mixed media of her own. She intentionally gravitated towards this mixed media in order to develop an accessible intersectionality between image-making, space, and spectatorship. 

This month’s LA Art artist spotlight is on Carla Jay Harris and her magical ability to create fantastical, yet intimately familiar, works.

Harris’s subjects and scenery are crafted from careful research, and this research can take a lengthy period to complete. She pulls from scholarly research, interviews, local history, and even her own family archives in order to ground her work. Harris has a deep yearning to open space for cross-cultural dialogue, which becomes its own form of political and social activism. Perhaps a form of political and social activism that people are better able to engage with and synthesize.

This month’s LA Art artist spotlight is on Carla Jay Harris and her magical ability to create fantastical, yet intimately familiar, works.

Taken from Harris’ A Season in the Wilderness are photos of her artwork on view at the Museum of Art and History, Lancaster (MOAH) as part of the Human Natures – Highlights from MOAH’s Permanent Collection. Harris simultaneously has an additional exhibition showing at Black Anatomy, Spartanburg Art Museum, running through June 2022.

This month’s LA Art artist spotlight is on Carla Jay Harris and her magical ability to create fantastical, yet intimately familiar, works.

Artist:

Carla Jay Harris

Current Exhibitions:

Museum of Art and History, Lancaster
Human Natures
Highlights from MOAH’s permanent collection

May 14 – August 21, 2022

Black Anatomy
Spartanburg Art Museum
Opening February 17
On view: February 2022 – June 2022

Raleigh Barrett Gallina
Raleigh (Barrett) Gallina from LA ART. Raleigh has been writing for the NoHo Arts District since 2015. Raleigh explores everything from large-scale commercial exhibitions to gratis solo exhibitions showcased by amateur galleries. While her preferences are ever-evolving, her favorite exhibitions include large-scale sculpture or paint, as well as artwork which holds socio-cultural underpinnings. She hopes that by capturing a large array of media and voices (including that of curators and the artists themselves), that readers are able to enjoy and voyeur out of their comfort zones.

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