Collection: 26q1 Waymond Harrison LIFE PROGRESSIONS

Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Waymond says, “the unchosen life is not worth living.”

Waymond Harrison’s LIFE PROGRESSIONS is best read this way: like an old, Socratic dialogue in paint. Not a neat argument with a final answer, but a series of returns—question, response, contradiction, return—about the choices, inside and outside the institution, that run life. Waymond and the justice system take various positions. Their exchange shifts tone and posture throughout: testimony, indictment, reconciliation, refusal, repair, transcendence.

Sometimes the system speaks in documents and categories: ID numbers, labels, status. 

Sometimes Waymond offers the only thing a system can’t fully metabolize: a human interior.

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Waymond Harrison (b. 1982, Portsmouth, VA) is a Baltimore-based painter whose life and work are driven by the limitless powers of daily choice. After spending more than 26 years in the justice system, Harrison began painting at 30 while incarcerated, creating his first work—a geometric self-portrait holding a heart—on an upside-down trash can in his prison cell. His superpowers are love, patience and discipline and art is his teacher: a way to see differently, grow, and open new conversations. Influenced by Kerry James Marshall and Virgil Abloh, he’s guided by writers including bell hooks, Charles F. Haanel, Gary Zukav, and David R. Hawkins. Daily, he paints alongside his heroes—Fred Hampton, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin—to provoke story, emotion and insist new futures are built through intentional choices.

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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/waymondlharrisonart/