Zeal Harris

"Username(Study)" dye sublimation on fabric

2017

Zeal Harris is known for creating seductive, caricaturesque, political, urban-vernacular, story paintings, with a blunt mix of high-brow/low-brow elements. Her micro-narratives offer...

Zeal Harris is known for creating seductive, caricaturesque, political, urban-vernacular, story paintings, with a blunt mix of high-brow/low-brow elements. Her micro-narratives offer socio-political commentary about a range of larger issues that often have to do with the layered experiences of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Almost always, the work is based on contemporary real life stories or events in daily life. She is a Los Angeles based visual artist who graduated from UCLA School of Film & Television and later with a MFA in Studio Art from Otis College of Art & Design. She has been in recent exhibitions at the Port Au Prince Haiti Ghetto Biennale, the California African-American Museum, and the Caribbean Cultural Center of the African Diaspora in New York. "Knight stealth" dye sublimation...

Zeal Harris is known for creating seductive, caricaturesque, political, urban-vernacular, story paintings, with a blunt mix of high-brow/low-brow elements. Her micro-narratives offer socio-political commentary about a range of larger issues that often have to do with the layered experiences of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Almost always, the work is based on contemporary real life stories or events in daily life. She is a Los Angeles based visual artist who graduated from UCLA School of Film & Television and later with a MFA in Studio Art from Otis College of Art & Design. She has been in recent exhibitions at the Port Au Prince Haiti Ghetto Biennale, the California African-American Museum, and the Caribbean Cultural Center of the African Diaspora in New York. "Contraband" dye sublimation...

Zeal Harris is known for creating seductive, caricaturesque, political, urban-vernacular, story paintings, with a blunt mix of high-brow/low-brow elements. Her micro-narratives offer...

Groot Foundation Grant Honorable Mention Recipient 2025 "My work, both in painting and sculpture, involve networks of intricately connected, overlapping, and morphing shapes and pat...

“What Fascism Means/Ass of Steel,” is a mixed media work on paper, with ink and textiles. This piece is mixes gestural abstraction and text to create the composition. Liddell often w...

The weird summer of 2020 series Mixed media on paper to be framed. I recommend you to frame an original work on paper. In terms of art preservation, it is better for a work on pa...

In 2020, amidst the lockdown's intensity, my art journey ignited professionally. With ample time to delve deep, I explored figurative painting and abstract drawings until early 2022. I created a different series of paintings, one standout series, "Black, Bold, and Beautiful," celebrated the radiant essence of black women through six vibrant portraits clad in Ankara suits. While one found a home with a collector in Tel Aviv, the rest lingered in my studio. Two years on, a spark ignites within me to revisit this series, infusing it with the evolved narrative that aligns and fits into the conversation my works now engage in as a Contemporary Gospeller. The notions of “Restoration and restitution” weigh heavily in my heart, reflecting on personal and global scales. While global discourse focuses on returning stolen artefacts from Africa back to their origins, my perspective delves deeper into the restoration of lost time and purpose. My point of view on Restoration and Restitution is from this notion that man can lose years of his life in futility, and when the time of profit comes, it occurs mostly at the brink of life. A profound scripture, "I'll restore the years that the locust has eaten," resonates deeply, offering a beacon of hope amidst perceived futility. When I read this verse, it distinctly jumped out at me. Wow! Years can be restored! There is hope! To make this revisiting more contextual, I look out for material which can be regarded as “used-up”, “less-value”, or “wasted” - then it appears to me that Jute sack fits into this context! The Jute sack stands for the lost years of glory, having exchanged hands from one country to another before ending up in my studio to take a new life, different from what it has been used for. Thus, the series finds renewal through the symbolism of jute bags...