Artist Reception Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Join us to celebrate the brand new exhibition of “Kameelah Janan Rasheed: all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext,” a multimedia solo exhibition featuring visual artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed (American, born 1985) on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from January 23 – March 23, 2024.

Rasheed thinks conceptually about text, type, and printed matter and uses publishing as a platform to engage and enlarge conversations with others. Her work invites important questions about the materiality of text, such as, “What is the shape of a failed sentence?” or even to quote Fred Moten speaking to the work of Renee Gladman, “Is there an underground railroad in the sentence?” These questions are central to the artist’s practice.

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores writing practices across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. Curious about the poetics and possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the reading and writing process, Rasheed explores Black knowledge production and fugitivity. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants – Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.

Exhibition hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6pm.