“When the work was first exhibited, it was considered highly controversial. It was ahead of its time in terms of the confluence of mediatization and personal archive, the juxtaposition of highly mediated images and personal, affectively charged materials.” – “Lyle Ashton Harris in Conversation with Pater Halley”, Lyle Ashton Harris, MARUANI MERCIER, 2014.

Executed in 1996, The Watering Hole is a nine-panel photographic series that presents an assembly of images from the artist’s personal archive, probing the relations between queerness, sexuality and violence. At once personal and political, the work operates at the intersection of key themes in the decades-long practice of the artist, who was the subject of a major retrospective at the Queens Museum in 2024. The present work is the only complete edition of nine panels in private hands, with another example in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and remaining editions having been sold separately in previous years.

There have only been a few exhibitions in which this important work has been on view in its entirety. The Watering Hole was first exhibited in Lyle Ashton Harris’ solo exhibition at Richard Tilton Gallery in 1996, to great acclaim. MARUANI MERCIER later staged a survey of Harris’ practice in Brussels in 2014, marking the first time the full set of nine panels appeared in an exhibition since 1996.

Mingling personal images, adverts, newspaper cut-outs and hand-written notes pinned onto a wood-panelled wall in saturated lighting, The Watering Hole traces the fascination with the black male body in visual culture, interrogating the border between sensuality and violence. Referencing the media coverage of serial killings by Jeffrey Dahmer, which were largely directed at black teenage boys, the work presents a poignant reflection on the traumas of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In each panel, Harris assembles and superimposes disparate, often contradictory images: Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, artist’s early self-portraits, stencilled letters spelling ‘daddy’, clippings from sports magazines, calendars and adverts that collectively allude to the notion of consumption of the body as image. Drawing on a metaphor of the watering hole as a place of rejuvenation as well as a site of precarity, this series seeks to explore the idea of ambivalence and contradictory spaces, pointing to the cultural tropes of desire for the other.

The artist has repeatedly returned to The Watering Hole as a seminal work in his practice, re-photographing and drawing on it in subsequent works. For Harris, the series operates as an important record of the complex historical period and of a formative moment in his artistic production. As the artist noted in his interview with the Brooklyn Rail, “Although The Watering Hole is dated 1996, there are certain images in this nine-panel work that go back to Act Up in ‘87, the exposé of Jeffery Dahmer coming to light, Magic Johnson coming out with HIV, and the L.A. uprising in ‘92—the images in these nine panels comprise a particular period of personal archive work.”