If you’re a habitual saver, not to say hoarder, of personal memorabilia — snapshots, postcards, clippings, ticket stubs, notes-to-self, — the time comes when you need to figure out what to do with the stuff — sort-and-toss, or deep store? — if only to clear space for more.

The artist Lyle Ashton Harris is just such a saver, and he’s found a terrific solution. He’s turned some three decades-worth of loosely curated personal accumulation into one of the most remarkable bodies of American art around, a data-dense, visually compelling archive, not just of one life but, as seen through that life, of the social and political history of Black queer culture in the post-Stonewall years.

The basic dynamic of his method and perspective is encapsulated in the phrase used as the title of his first New York survey, “Lyle Ashton Harris: Our First and Last Love,” now at the Queens Museum. He came across the phrase on a slip of paper in a Chinese fortune cookie back in the early 1990s, and pasted it, as he regularly did other finds, in a notebook.

That notebook is in the show, and if you track it down you discover that the “fortune” actually reads in full: “Our first and last love is … Self-Love.” And right from the start, Harris has used self-image, directly or indirectly — who he is, what he has — as a tool of personal and political investigation.

His earliest work is a form of theatrical self-portraiture. As an undergraduate in the late 1980s at Wesleyan University, where he came out as gay and was one of the few Black students, he photographed himself in a blond wig and whiteface, flipping old machismo and minstrelsy tropes that still attached to Blackness. In self-portraits from a few years later he pushed a little harder.