YALE MFA 25’

Erol Scott Harris is a multidisciplinary artist who creates identity-based work. Originally from Chicago, Illinois, Harris studied painting and comes from a music background, having played cello for many years. Collaboration is a big part of his work and combining painting and performance has also become increasingly important to him.

In the studio, Erol s LORE, a pseudonym character he embodies in the studio. LORE also happens to be his name spelled backwards, thus signaling the synergistic relationship between, EROL “himself”, and his artist self, LORE.

Harris draws strength from ancestral influences, including intergenerational knowledge and vernacular traditions from his grandparents, who migrated to the United States from a small, rural community in Guanajuato, Mexico. Their work as floorers and railroad workers in Chicago, Illinois has shaped his perception of world building, turning his body into a tool for creating and the ground beneath him into a vessel of meaning.

For Erol, forming an impression also depends on how objects impress on us. He believes human skin and architectural skin share a heritage of purity of form and cleanliness. They have been defined or controlled by an outside "authority" in modern settings; his work seeks to disrupt that reality by revealing the material’s sublayers in hopes to give room for alternative visions of black and brown humanity, or the black and brown body, in architecture.