^{P.C.,Natasha Moustache} 

Erol Scott Harris II works across painting, collage, and installation. His practice investigates the floor and the ground as sites where material histories, labor, and memory accumulate. Drawing from his family’s history in flooring and railroad work in Chicago, Harris works with layered surfaces and industrial materials to examine how built environments and infrastructures quietly shape movement, labor, and value.

Harris received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2025, where he was awarded the Dean’s Prize and the Golden Paint Award. He previously earned a BFA from Columbia College Chicago. His work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, including presentations with Perrotin (New York), Cam Contemporarie (Chicago), Chili Art Projects (London), and the Afro-American Cultural Center in New Haven.

His work has been recognized through awards and residencies including the Newcity Breakout Artist award (2023), the TSA CHI/NY Residency (2022), and the ACRE Residency (2020). He is currently developing a new body of work in collaboration with SkyART in Chicago, extending his studio practice through public programs and community engagement.

Harris is drawn to the surfaces that hold memory that often go unnoticed. This inquiry grows from his family’s history: on his mother’s side, his family migrated from Mexico, and on his father’s side, from the American South, where traditions of building, making, and care converge, shaping how lives and spaces take form and how materials are used, reused, and carried forward.

In his practice, the floor becomes both material and metaphor, a site where buried histories press upward. He also draws on the idea of the ground in painting, the often unseen surface that supports and stabilizes an image, thinking of it as a parallel to the built floors beneath us, both foundational and rarely acknowledged. Painting is not only an image, but a place of uncovering. Through it, Harris asks us to consider how spaces are made, who builds them, and how those histories remain present, even when unseen.

The studio becomes a space of circulation and return, where materials, gestures, and meanings gather over time. Layers are built, disrupted, carried forward, and transformed. Each work emerges through accumulation, holding traces of what has been added, removed, worn down, and remade.

Harris is especially interested in the idea of an impression. An impression can be a mark left on a surface, a copy or image, or even a feeling that stays with us. In his work, an impression holds the memory of the action that made it, the pressure, the movement, the force. Each mark carries a life-lived.

 ^{︎ CV PDF}