Ilana Harris-Babou
“Some of them would try to make themselves look as though they were handwritten. There were others that came with a real dollar bill attached to a piece of paper. And it would say, like, “I have hundreds of thousands more where this came from. Give me a call.” You know, almost like literal bait dangling. . . . My mom has hundreds of beauty products. I recast them and embedded the letters inside them and made this display that is surreal—it flattens out both those forms of flattery: the flattery that exists in the letters, and the way beauty products talk about your future body, what your body would look like, if you were to buy them.”
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is also author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Ilana Harris-Babou (b. 1991 Brooklyn, NY) earned a BA from Yale University and a MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. She has exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Art and Design, New York, USA; The Whitney Museum of Art, New York, USA; The Studio Museum, New York, USA; Sculpture Center, Queens, USA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, USA; Jewish Museum, New York, USA; Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany; Laundry Arts, London, UK; Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, USA; Abrons Art Center, New York, USA; among others. Ilana Harris-Babou has participated in residencies at PICA (2019), Lighthouse Works (2019), the Whitney Museum of Art (2019), Recess Art (2018), BRIC (2016), and School of Making Thinking (2014), and will be in residence at Pioneer Works in Fall 2020. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Ilana Harris-Babou
“Some of them would try to make themselves look as though they were handwritten. There were others that came with a real dollar bill attached to a piece of paper. And it would say, like, “I have hundreds of thousands more where this came from. Give me a call.” You know, almost like literal bait dangling. . . . My mom has hundreds of beauty products. I recast them and embedded the letters inside them and made this display that is surreal—it flattens out both those forms of flattery: the flattery that exists in the letters, and the way beauty products talk about your future body, what your body would look like, if you were to buy them.”
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is also author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
Ilana Harris-Babou (b. 1991 Brooklyn, NY) earned a BA from Yale University and a MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. She has exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Art and Design, New York, USA; The Whitney Museum of Art, New York, USA; The Studio Museum, New York, USA; Sculpture Center, Queens, USA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, USA; Jewish Museum, New York, USA; Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany; Laundry Arts, London, UK; Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, USA; Abrons Art Center, New York, USA; among others. Ilana Harris-Babou has participated in residencies at PICA (2019), Lighthouse Works (2019), the Whitney Museum of Art (2019), Recess Art (2018), BRIC (2016), and School of Making Thinking (2014), and will be in residence at Pioneer Works in Fall 2020. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.