Professional Summary
Mark Harris is an artist, writer, and curator. He researches how individuals and groups use language, imagery, and music to reveal everyday experience as remarkable. His artwork and writing concern intentional communities and avant-garde groups, including Fourier’s 19th-century Harmony, Surrealist writers, 1960s communes, Beat poets and filmmakers, and musician communities including Caribbean singers and UK punk bands.
Selected recent art initiatives include:
Sparrow Come Back Home, Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnait, 2026; Beauty is a Blast, Art Cake Gallery, Brooklyn, 2025; African Plant Diaspora & Predatory Botany, Lloyd Library & Museum, Cincinnati, 2025; Book, Beeler Gallery, Columbus College of Art and Design, 2025; Cycles, Solar Noon, Cincinnati, 2024; Summit Gallery, Cincinnati, 2023; Monsieur Zohore: MZ.25 (My Condolences), M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023; The Scripts Found in a Bottle, Found in Can, Found in a Discourse, The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, 2022; Speculative Magenta Hauntology, Ruschwoman, Chicago, 2021; Camp Street Corner, Wave Pool, Cincinnati, 2020; ?timbreland? with Yoshi Nakamura and Frog Hole?, Valley Park, Cincinnati, 2020; Facts ‘n’ Figures, Kunstraum am Schauplatz, Vienna, 2020; Flugblätter, Clay Street Press/Cincinnati, Düsseldorf/Germany, Kendall/England, Dordrecht/Holland, Maebashi/Japan, Loitz/Germany, 2017-2020; Songs the Plants Taught Us, Anytime Dept., Cincinnati, 2019; Words, Converso, Milan, 2019; Plastilene, fluc, Vienna, 2018; Music To Die To–Eno’s “Music for Airports,” Studio 94, London, 2018; Sparrow Come Back Home, ICA London, 2016-17; The Nothing That Is, The Carnegie, Covington, Kentucky, 2017; Bad Music Seminar, Music from the Heartland, Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, New York, 2017; Bad Music Seminar, DIY Punk, Wave Pool, Cincinnati, 2016; John Cage’s Variations II (for 5 turntables) The Carnegie, Covington, Kentucky, 2016; Cherry & Lucic, Portland, OR, 2016; After the Moment: Reflections on Robert Mapplethorpe, CAC, Cincinnati; Bad Music Seminar 2, performance, The Showroom, London; Bad Music Seminar 3: Sex, Murder, Politics, 4: Song Poems and 5: Becoming-Animal, performances, The Horse Hospital, London, 2014; London Open, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2012
Selected publications include:
forthcoming: “I must be given words—Brathwaite’s fashioning of languages adequate to Caribbean histories and futures,” Routledge anthology of essays on Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants; “Noise is that decorative energy: realizations of silence and sound in postcolonial Caribbean poetics,” for Routledge Companion to Literature and Sound; “Songs the Plants Taught us: strange entanglements of vinyl records and horticulture” The Cultures of Entanglement. On Nonhuman Life Forms in Contemporary Art, Transcript Verlag, Germany, 2024; review of Thomas Crow’s The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge, 2023, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024; Sonic Wilderness: Wild Vinyl Records, AADR (Art Architecture Design Research), Spurbuchverlag, Germany, 2022; “Alternative Soundscape Paradigms from Kamau Brathwaite and the Mighty Sparrow,” Small Axe, 2021; “A Note on Hallucinatory Film,” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 2020; “A great chaos of sound: alternative practices of working through madness, alienation, and the aesthetics of Catastrophe in 60s Britain,” Counterculture Studies, 2020; “Rebellious Type: the visual acoustics of Kamau Brathwaite’s typographic derangements,” Manifold: Experimental Criticism fall 2020; “Music to die to,” Divergence Press, Centre for New Music, University of Huddersfield, 2019; Artforum.com reviews, 2015-19; “Turntable Materialities,” Seismograf, Denmark, 2017; ‘Intoxicating Painting’, Journal of Contemporary Painting 2017; “The Materiality of Water,” Aesthetic Investigations, 2015; “Cinema, studio, tools” in Proto-Tools 1, Flat Time House, London, 2014; “A Local Culture: tradition and risk in Cincinnati” in here., PAFA, Philadelphia, 2011; “Countercultural Intoxication: An Aesthetics of Transformation”, book chapter in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in American Art, 1965-1977, University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Recent press includes:
Tiffany Luckey, “Uncover the wonder of African plants at the Lloyd Library”, Cincinnati Magazine, March 20, 2025; R. Alan Wight, “The African Plant Diaspora,” pp26-27, Cincinnati’s Foodshed: An Art Atlas, 2024; “Let It Go!,” The Welcome Handbook, pp18-27, Wave Pool and The Welcome Project, 2024; Nick Swartsell, “Camp Washington's art community is weird, wild, and growing”, WVXU, April 27, 2023; Sukhdev Sandhu, The Wire, review of Sonic Wilderness: Wild Vinyl Records, February, 2022
Research Support
Grant: #Nam June Paik Investigators:Harris, Mark 01-01-2009 -08-01-2011 Getty Foundation Nam June Paik Sculpture Conservation Role:PI $75,000.00 Closed Level:Private Non-Profit
Grant: #R40750 Investigators:Bicknaver, Britni; Harris, Mark; Trusty, Susan 07-01-2019 -12-31-2020 UC's AHSS Faculty Research Summer Stipend Program Songs the Plants Taught Us Role:PI $9,667.98 Active Level:Internal UC