Ilana Harris-Babou

Ilana Harris-Babou (b. 1991, Brooklyn) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, video, and installation.

Recent work looks to the generative friction produced by urban democratic spaces such as subways, parades, beaches and parks. Adopting Audre Lorde’s poem, A Litany for Survival, as a starting point, the artist catalogues how cities are imprinted with their occupants’ indelible voices and desires. Lorde’s poem laments the generational inheritances of material and cultural marginalization, discussing the curtailed choices facing "those of us/who live at the shoreline/standing upon the constant edge of decision." As the daughter of parents who came to Lorde’s Harlem neighborhood from Senegal and the Jim Crow south, Harris-Babou adopts the poet’s admonition to "speak/remembering/we were never meant to survive" in work that celebrates solidarity by seeking out layered accumulations of collective presence, voice and engagement within the urban landscape

Juxtaposing ordered white subway tile with handmade and glazed tesserae, Harris-Babou’s most recent series of mosaic wall reliefs extol the NYC subway system as a site whose scale and utility allow hierarchical relations to give way to impromptu connections. In IRT 1 (2025), named for the city’s original subway line, the artist draws from the color palette of Sterling Street Station in her emphasis of the remnants of history and collective memory embedded in the system’s different architectural eras. Index (2025) is made up of hundreds of cast ceramic impressions of fingerprints and the ubiquitous swipe gesture used to operate digital touchscreens, all held together in a found wooden frame reminiscent of the presentation of old subway maps. Evoking a multitude of people mediating both digital and physical reality simultaneously, the piece materializes traces of touch.

The incongruity between rigid forms and embodied improvisatory gestures is at the core of Harris-Babou’s practice. Isolating instances of genuine expression and the forging of commonality amid difference, the artist’s journey from the crushing daily demands of the city to the shared vista of the shoreline echoes the famous exhortation of the May ’68 student activists: ‘Sous les Pavés, la Plage!' (beneath the pavement, the beach).

Living between Brooklyn and Connecticut, where she is Assistant Professor of Art at Wesleyan University, Harris-Babou's work has been exhibited throughout the US and Europe. Recent exhibitions include Between Tides curated by the Public Art Fund, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica at The Art Institute of Chicago, which traveled to MACBA (2025) and the Barbican (2026); Brooklyn Artists Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2024); Golden Thread at Crisp-Ellert Art Museum (Saint Augustine, FL) and Under My Feet at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. In May 2023, Harris Babou's video installation Liquid Gold took over the screens of Times Square for the Midnight Moment program.

She has also been included in the Istanbul Design Biennial (2020) and The Whitney Biennial (2019). Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Wellcome Collection (London), and Electronic Arts Intermix, among others. Her exhibitions have been widely reviewed, including in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, e-flux, Sculpture Magazine, and Art in America. In 2024, the artist was the subject of Ilana Harris-Babou’s Guide to Health & Happiness, a short film produced by Art21.