The Moody Center for the Arts invites you to experience Lisa E. Harris’s new work, “Import.” The singer/songwriter created the performance in response to the exhibition on view, which comments on the global, societal impacts of labor and trade. Taking this idea to the local level, Harris uses theremins, vibraphones, and her own voice to speak to Houston’s creative imports and exports. Specifically, Harris is offering a comment on the value of art that comes from “away” versus that which is homegrown.

A Houston native, trained in classical opera and a graduate of The New School’s Mannes College and the Manhattan School of Music in New York, Harris performance is a comment on the post-pandemic question in this new world of remote work: How can we start to value the creative work that generates exclusively from here and can being “still” be a creative asset instead of a demerit?

A Monroe Research Fellow at Tulane University’s Center for the Gulf South, Lisa “Li” Harris is also the 2021 recipient of the Dorothea Tanning Award for Music/Sound, awarded by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Recognized by Huffington Post as one of “14 Artist Who Are Transforming the Future of Opera,” Li’s work resists genre classification as she focuses on the energetic relationships between body, land, spirit and place. She is also the founder and creative director of Studio Enertia, an arts collective and production company in Houston, Texas.