Christi Harris: Lachrymose

Christi Harris Statement for Lachrymose : This work explores the intersection of grieving and “emotional labor” made tangible in embroidered phrases from condolence letters from a late 19th-century Virginia family. Harris discovered the letters at a flea market, and during the pandemic she spent time painstakingly embroidering words or phrases from the letters onto handkerchiefs in the style of the writer’s handwriting. Hundreds of these embroidered receptacles for grief and tears will be suspended around the viewer in the Microgallery

CHRISTI HARRIS AND TRACY RICE WEBER DISCUSS LACHRYMOSE      

Christi Harris earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at Missouri State in Springfield, Missouri. The year following graduation, she pursued her M.F.A. in painting and printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, graduating in 1995.

Her major series of works since graduation have always focused on personal and societal issues, with an underlying reliance on technical skill while using formal arrangements of color, pattern and shape.  Her most recent series, “Meta-Palettes”, focuses on viewing her art process as an art product.  The larger-than-life imagery of the paint on her palette is used to create the focus of this series, painted in trompe l’oeil style with oils on canvas.

Her academic career has taken her to three states and seven teaching institutions.  Christi is Chair of the Department of Fine Art and Art History at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia where she teaches foundation and advanced studio courses in painting and drawing.