Exhibit explores the question ‘Can strangers become family?’

For 25 years, filmmaker and transmedia artist Thomas Allen Harris has mined his family’s and extended family’s archives to explore identity and create dialogues and connections across cultures and between generations. Since 2009, he has toured nationally and internationally with his Digital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR) Roadshow, a live and virtual meeting space designed to encourage other people to engage with their family photographic archives in galvanizing ways.

The Gallery at the Whitney is exhibiting the first DDFR project to feature formally printed large-scale images together with the stories of the subjects who shared them. Titled “Digital Diaspora Family Reunion: Turning Strangers into Family,” the exhibition coincides with “Strategies of Visual Memoir in Art Practice,” an interdisciplinary, studio-based class Harris is teaching this fall in the Yale School of Art. Over the course of the term, students in the class will each curate a new “re-mix” of the exhibit drawing on their own images and texts as well as images from the DDFR archive. Visitors to the exhibit may also submit their own photographs via email at 1world1family.me@gmail.com. 

Harris says a central question of his work has been: What does it mean to change the visual narrative of a country?

“DDFR is a natural outgrowth of my process and has been performed at festivals, museums, colleges, libraries, public housing projects, and other venues across the country,” he says. “… My hope is that this interactive exhibition will serve as a type of crossroads — a meeting space, between cultures and communities, the present and the past — and provide a meditation on how the family album shapes our humanity and the way we see others. Can the family album turn strangers into family? Can it help us to see, in the words of Natalie Goldberg, that ‘our lives are at once ordinary and mythical?’”

Harris’ works illuminate the human condition and the search for identity, family, and spirituality. He also lectures widely on the use of media as a tool for social change. His DDFR project has also been show in Canada, Brazil, and Ethiopia as well as streamed online. 

Visitors are also welcome to attend the course’s Sunday film screenings, “Identity & Representation: In the Obama Era,” a series of experimental and art-focused documentaries that draw on the archive and personal memoir as sources of inspiration. For dates and times, see the Whitney Humanities Center calendar.

The Gallery at the Whitney is located in the Whitney Humanities Center at 53 Wall St. It is open to the public Monday and Wednesday 3-5 p.m. or by appointment at 203-432-0670.