Shikeith

Created in conjunction with artist and filmmaker Shikeith’s 2019 installation The Language Must Not Sweat at Locust Projects, an immersive installation that mines what puddles at the core of the public and subconscious lives of black men. The work ponders the symbolic moisture of blackness at the intersections of queerness and masculinity. The print features a still from one of the five videos installed in the exhibition.

Shikeith (b. 1989, Philadelphia, PA) received his BA from The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA for Integrative Art (2010) and his MFA in Sculpture from The Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2018). His work attempts an assemblage of personal truths and wonder that focuses on the metamorphoses of Black men, especially within a society that denies these men their erotic and reconciliatory potential and capital. It is the interior he considers—his own, as well as, other Black men or masculine people through emphasizing portraiture, sculpture, and filmmaking to examine the fantastic as it relates and complicates personal autobiography and self-making.