Waymond Harrison
LIFE PROGRESSIONS
E1507 Winter Showcase (2026)
Curated by Dustin Kuhns
Photos by Nathan Mitchell
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.
Two pairs, one downstairs and one upstairs, serve as bookends. First, the pair at the entry, a visceral, self-portrait-style rendering of Waymond’s prison ID sits next to his real release ID alongside a Scrabble board. On one hand, the documents that claim to define a person assign him a number, a letter, a status. On the other, block letters “LIFE CHOICES” are selected and placed by the artist as player.
Upstairs, above the bed, a black-and-white geometric self-portrait holding a heart (My Heart, 2014) meets the same self-portrait figure years later (Self Portrait, 2025). Growth requires two things: change, and the constant that changes. In Waymond’s work, that “constant” is not a fixed identity—it’s a practice of discipline: returning to the self with honesty and intention.
Waymond’s works feature frequent returns to the forms, figures and words he uses to rehearse life choices through artistic ones. He moves back and forth between charged, maximalist compositions and understated, graphic portraiture: grayscale faces set against bright, confrontational grounds where text explains and insists.
The paint—especially black—builds textures like resistance to institutional flattening. Skulls recur from different angles like studies: a nod to still life tradition, and a sober acknowledgment of how institutional life can make the self an object to be filed, categorized, or repeated.
The word LIFE returns throughout the series so frequently it risks becoming background noise. But monotonous, repetition is the point. It behaves like a “visual satiation”: the way a word, when repeated out loud, can lose its meaning temporarily.
The materials of our lives (like the vibrations in a voice box) are nonsense, until we choose to make sense of them.
In a moment saturated with cynicism about agency—about whether our actions matter on the scale of the news—Waymond’s work refuses denial and despair.
Life is not just what happens to us. It is what we choose, repeatedly, to make of what we are given.
About the Artist
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.