Rachel Harrison Life Hack: Life Hack

“The work of the sculptor Rachel Harrison is both the zeitgeist and the least digestible in contemporary art. It may also be the most important, owing to an originality that breaks a prevalent spell in an art world of recycled genres, styles, and ideas.”—Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker

In her sculptures, room-sized installations, drawings, photographs, and artist’s books, Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) delves into themes of celebrity culture, pop psychology, history, and politics. This publication, created in close collaboration with the artist, explores twenty-five years of her practice and is the first comprehensive monograph on Harrison in nearly a decade. Its centerpiece is an in-depth plate section, which doubles as a chronology of Harrison’s major works, series, and exhibitions. Objects are illustrated with multiple views and details, and accompanied by short texts. This thorough approach elucidates Harrison’s complicated, eclectic oeuvre—in which she integrates found materials with handmade sculptural elements, upends traditions of museum display, and injects quotidian objects with a sense of strangeness. Six accompanying essays cover Harrison’s earliest works to her most recent output. The book also includes a handful of photo-collages that the artist created specifically for this project. Published here for the first time, these pieces superimpose found images with reproductions of Harrison’s own past work.

Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art

Exhibition Schedule:

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020)

David Joselit is distinguished professor in the Art History Department of the City University of New York Graduate Center. Elisabeth Sussman is Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.