“American Artist’s work encapsulates a vast range of ideas and artistic vocabularies that offer an incisive lens onto the interrelated nature of race, technology, and social structures. Their practice also importantly takes up questions around the ethics of how we collaborate and explores alternative models of pedagogy.“- jurors Eileen Jeng Lynch, Director of Curatorial Programs, The Bronx Museum, and Diana Nawi, Independent Curator.

Using the media of sculpture, video and digital art, much of Artist’s work over the past several years has been rooted in Black Studies, referencing scholars such as Fred Moten and Simone Browne. Many of their works are what the artist calls “speculative artifacts,” resembling devices, tools, or video evidence of real world events but are clever fictions, subtly posing questions such as “is this real??” Artist uses this strategy to spin their own narratives that expose the truth of history and are more wild than fiction.

American Artist makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Artist is a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Visual Art and a Creative Capital grantee. Their upcoming project ‘The Monophobic Response’ will be presented as part of Getty’s Pacific Standard Time in 2024. Artist is a former co-director of the School for Poetic Computation and is a core faculty at Yale School of Art.