Family and early life
Carole Harris was born in 1943 at Wayne Diagnostic Hospital, a Black hospital in then-segregated in Detroit, Michigan, during the summer of the 1943 Detroit riots. Harris was born two months prematurely at only 2 pounds, and spent extended time in the hospital as a result. Her mother had to take public transportation across the rioting to bring breast milk to the hospital for Harris. "That trauma," Harris has said, "was my start to life." Her father was away serving in the U.S. army during World War II, so her mother moved in with family until his return in 1945. They lived with Harris's grandfather Bishop Simmons, who had migrated to Detroit in the 1930s from Tennessee, and Harris's Aunt Ida, a lifelong role model for Harris as the matriarch of the family and a working woman. At six years old, Harris's mother taught her to embroider. She also learned to sew at a very young age, so early that Harris doesn't consciously remember when she started. She made much of her own clothing as a young woman. Her grandmother and mother were both traditional quilters. The first quilt that Harris made used a "pinwheel pattern" design for her wedding to Bill Harris in 1966. A key reason quilting interested her was because she considered it to be a "nonintimidating art form." She met Harris, a writer, while they were both students at Highland Park Junior College. They are still married and continue to live in Detroit.Education
Harris went to public school on the East Side of Detroit, in a multiracial working-class neighborhood. Advanced in her skills, she entered school in the first grade rather than kindergarten and she would eventually skip 5th grade too. She loved school and learning and showed artistic talent while attending Cass Technical High School, but did not consider an education or career in the arts until college. Harris started her higher education at Highland Park Junior College (HPJC) and graduated fromDesign career
Harris did not want to depend on selling her art to make a living for herself, so she worked a "day job" for over 30 years as a commercial designer, specializing in architecture and interiors. She designed for several Detroit firms, including Nathan Johnson and Associates, where she became Director of interior design in 1974. Frustrated at seeing white co-workers advancing faster than her while she worked just as hard, Harris decided to found her own firm, which she called Interior Planning and Design. She served as president there until retiring in 2008, designing for clients including the Museum of African American History, Wayne County Community College, and Detroit Public Schools among others.Quilting and artistic process
Harris loves the touch and feel of working with fabric, and finds that she can accomplish anything with this medium that she could with paint. Harris has called her use of quilting "very personal" and necessary channel for expressing her impressions of the world. She began with traditional quilts, but she eventually tired of "the sameness and predictability" of patterning. Experimenting with quilting's more conventional forms led Harris to a distinct compositional style—part improvisation, part designed patterning—that blends painting, African American quilting, and African textile art. Her work has also been referred to as " assemblages" or "constructions" given the way they frequently break from the traditional rectangular form of a quilt into uniquely shaped forms. Her compositions are also architectural, as she pushes the boundaries of quilt construction into three-dimensional space. Harris is also known for fine detail work, often including embroidery into her compositions. Harris often begins a piece with a sketch or a beginning of an idea, then works improvisationally with her materials to catch onto related motifs and ideas from her consciousness. She has connected her experimental modes of discovery with those of other forms of art invigorated by improvisation: literature, dance, and music, especially jazz. This practice often results in a small study tacking together very tiny collections of scraps, which can evolve into very large pieces. Harris keeps all of her scraps of material and thread, to recycle into future art work.Signature style
Harris's work is largely non-representational, inspired by African methods of art-making that emphasize rhythm, pattern, and other modes of non-literal artistic expression. She also uses African-made cloth in her work, often in ways that emphasize patterning and abstraction. Harris cites music and its concepts of "motion, rhythm, and harmony" as being fundamental to her aesthetic, particularly Black diasporic forms such as jazz, spirituals, and Hip Hop, and the titles of many of her artworks reflect this musical influence. Harris has also said that she "sees in strips," in reference to the patterns she notices in the world as well as how she constructs many of her pieces, a process that has resonance in kente cloth fromInfluence of Detroit
Critics see important linkages between Harris's art and her lifelong hometown of Detroit, particularly the way that Harris's work visibly emphasizes labor, rhythm, patterning, and assembly—all key elements of an industrial city driven by factory work for much of the 20th century. She has lived in the city her entire life and continues to represent the Detroit arts scene globally. In November 2024, Harris traveled to Paris, France with over 50 Detroit artists, curators, and other arts personnel as ambassadors for new arts initiatives in the city. As she told the '' Michigan Chronicle'', "Detroit has been the subject of so much derision and negativity for far too many years. To be there, exhibiting our work, and representing the city in a positive way to a global audience in an official capacity was beyond anything I ever imagined."Themes of artwork
One theme throughout Harris's career is the passage of time and its impact on people, materials, and memory. Her methods and compositions work with ideas of decay and aging as well as the impulse and ability to mend and renew. She collect and uses old garments in her work, exploring how colors change, run, and fade as well as the enduring relationships people have with clothes over their lifetimes. Many of Harris's quilt compositions are cityscapes, such as ''View from the Kitchen on Preston Street'' (1999) and landscapes, like ''Down the Road a Piece'' (2003). Others explore aspects of movement and dance, as in ''Something like a Jitterbug'' (1994), that connects forms of African American dance to Yoruba Egungun practices.Arts career and accomplishments
In 1990, Harris started a quilt series in honor of the release ofReferences