Season Twelve Twenty Summers, rooted in Provincetown’s Hawthorne Barn, celebrates artistic freedom, offering resources, residencies, and a platform for originality and innovation, honoring its rich legacy.
In this exhibition, multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and scholar, Thomas Allen Harris, pulls from his vast collection of 1980s black and white photography and 1990s diaristic video entries to demonstrate the ethos of the black queer renaissance of the late 20th century.
He presents House of Haizlip—a curated selection of photographs from events programmed by his close friend and mentor, Ellis Haizlip, between 1986 and 1989 at the Schomburg Center for Research—and Tahj Diary (1990)—a video where Harris uses the camera as a therapist and discusses the end of his romantic relationship. Together, these works patchwork threads of black queer radical politics and forms of cultural expression including community development, imaginative performance, personal testimony, and self-documentation. They beckon the viewer to critically contemplate the disruptive power that these artistic and cultural strategies had for a generation grappling with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the individualistic ethos championed by Reagan’s neoliberalism, and the rise of the Moral Majority, which pathologized kinship formations outside of white, heterosexist family structures.
