Mark Yale Harris
Born in Buffalo, New York, Mark Yale Harris showed artistic interest and talent from his earliest years and won numerous art awards and scholarships throughout his school years. He was encouraged however, to take a more conventional vocational path that led him to a successful real estate and hotel development career after graduating from Ohio State University in 1961. Harris never abandoned his passion for art and in 1996, after selling his business, immersed himself in developing a second career as an artist.
Harris sought out an artist he had both admired and collected to be his mentor, Bill Prokopiof. Prokopiof and fellow Native American artist Allan Houser took Harris under their wings. They shared their talent and experience and nurtured Harris’s own vision as he created and developed a body of work in alabaster, marble, limestone and bronze. The influence of these mentors inspired Harris to create work that presents the universal connection between the self and the natural world. His solemn, meditative animals, fish and abstract figures are intimate, easily accessible forms whose rounded curves, innate surface patterns and textures belie the hard, cold materials that they have evolved from. “Alternating between gesture and geometric form, depicting the contradictions we experience in nature, awakening in the viewer an appreciation of the duality in the world around us is my objective,” says Harris. “It is my belief that as we go through life we can only create from that which we have or are given. We cannot replace that which is lost or taken away or that which we never had.”
Mark Harris’s work has won numerous awards throughout the United States; is represented in several museum sculpture collections, as well as in international corporate and private collections.