Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Emerson Contemporary proudly presents our upcoming artist-in-residence, 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 the visual artist is on view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street from January 23 – March 23, 2024. Exhibition hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6pm.

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.

Her recent solo exhibitions include KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). In 2024, she will have a solo exhibition at REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA). Rasheed is the author of five artists’ books:
in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing,
2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions,
2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the
Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). She is an adjunct instructor at the Cooper Union
and Barnard College, a Critic at Yale School of Art, Sculpture, and an instructor at the
School for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consulting
business that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions in
designing expansive and liberatory learning experiences.
Rasheed is represented by NOME Gallery in Berlin, Germany.

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