Mark Harris

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
 

Diploma: Edinburgh College of Art Edinburgh, Scotland, 1977 (Painting)

Postdiploma: Edinburgh College of Art Edinburgh, Scotland, 1978 (Painting)

MA: Royal College of Art London, England, 1982 (Painting)

MA: University of Warwick Coventry, England, 1997 (Continental Philosophy)

PhD: Goldsmiths, University of London London, England, 2006 (Philosophy)

Investigators: Mark Harris, Charlie Woodman 2009 -2011 Getty Foundation Nam June Paik Sculpture Conservation Role: PI $75,000.00 Completed

Investigators: Mark Harris 2005 Ohio Arts Council, Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award: Video and New Media $5,000 Completed Type:Grant

Grant: #R40750 Investigators: Britni Bicknaver; Mark Harris; Susan Trusty 2019 -2021 UC Songs the Plants Taught Us Role: PI $9,667.98 Completed Type:Grant

Investigators: Mark Harris 2009 -2010 Warhol Foundation/Creative Captital Art Writer's Grant “Publico: five years of an artist-run space in Cincinnati” $15,000 Completed Type:Grant

Investigators: Mark Harris 2012 Ohio Arts Council Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award: Critical Writing Completed Type:Grant

Investigators: Mark Harris 2015 Ohio Arts Council Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award: Interdisciplinary Media Type:Grant

Investigators:Mark Harris 2006 UC Utopian-Bands, Beijing, University Research Council Faculty Award Completed Type:Grant

Investigators: Mark Harris 2006 UC Faculty Development Grant: research on contemporary art in New York Completed

Investigators: Mark Harris 2010 UC Faculty Development Award: College Art Association Conference, New York Completed Type:Grant

Investigators: Mark Harris 2016 UC Faculty Development Award: Sound Art conferences, England and Denmark Completed Type:Grant

Investigators:Mark Harris, Carmel Buckley 2016 UC Third Century Research Award, for Mighty Sparrow exhibition at ICA, London $9,000 Completed Type:Grant

Investigators:Mark Harris 2017 UC Faculty Development Award: “Calypso Soundscapes: intimate acoustics and defiant language in Kamau Brathwaite and Mighty Sparrow,” Caribbean Insecurities Conference, The British Library Completed

Investigators: Mark Harris 2017 Ohio Arts Council Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award: Interdisciplinary Media Completed

Investigators: Mark Harris 2021 Ohio Arts Council Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award: Non-fiction Completed Type:Grant

Investigators: Mark Harris 2023 UC Patricia A. Renick Faculty Grant for International Travel, Society of Caribbean Studies Conference, Leicester University, England Completed Type:Grant

Investigators: Mark Harris 2024 Lloyd Library & Museum Lloyd Library Artist in Residence award, research focus: the African plant diaspora Completed Type:Grant

Investigators: Mark Harris, Lloyd Library 2024 -2025 The Haile Foundation Lloyd Library & Museum African Plant Diaspora Symposium and Community Dinner Role: PI $10,000 Completed Type:Grant

Investigators: Mark Harris 2024 UC Faculty Development Award: West Indian Literature Conference, University of the West Indies, Port of Spain, Trinidad Completed Type:Grant

Investigators:Mark Harris 2025 UC CDRI Scholarly Research Award: The Enduring Impact of the African Plant Diaspora exhibition, Lloyd Library & Museum Role:PI Completed Type:Grant

Investigators: Mark Harris 2025 UC Patricia A. Renick Faculty Grant for International Travel, Society of Caribbean Studies Conference, Bristol University, England Completed Type:Grant