Jacolby Satterwhite (born 1986 in Columbia, South Carolina) is an American contemporary artist recognizable for fusing performance, digital animation, and personal ephemera to create immersive installations inspired by art history, "expanded cinema", and the pop-cultural worlds of music videos, social media, and video games.[1] Satterwhite was awarded the United States Artist Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellowship in 2016 and has exhibited work at institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, New Museum, New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.[2] He is based in Brooklyn, NY.
Jacolby Satterwhite | |
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Born | 1986 (age 35–36) |
Nationality | American |
Education | Maryland Institute College of Art University of Pennsylvania |
Movement | Video art, Digital art, Sculpture, Painting |
Satterwhite was born in Columbia, South Carolina. As a child, he would watch Janet Jackson's video anthology VHS tape everyday after school. Music videos by Deee Lite, Björk, Janet, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Michael Jackson and Madonna also influenced his aesthetic. He began working with technology at the age of 11 when he got his first personal computer.
Satterwhite received his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008 and he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture the next year.[3] He received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010.
Satterwhite's work often utilizes his mother's schematic drawings/inventions of ordinary objects influenced by consumer culture, medicine, fashion, Surrealism, mathematics, sex, philosophy, astrology, and matrilineal concerns.[4]
His series Reifying Desire was featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Combining 3D animation and live action, the work explores themes of memory and personal history in a virtual dreamlike environment.[5] In an interview from late 2014, Satterwhite describes how his broader creative approach informed Reifying Desire:
My work is about observation in general. I'm interested in the potential of what observation can do when synthesized unnaturally. How can you bring together personal, private, and public? How can you bring together drawing, performance, animation, painting, and sculpture and weave them into a uniform space and make sense out of it? That's why I called the series [in the Whitney Biennial] Reifying Desire. I was interested in how one person could concretize abstraction, because reification is about concretizing abstraction. It's about making something unnatural and indefinable concrete. The whole oxymoron is that I never achieve specificity in my work, ever. It never concretizes; it just gets more abstract.[6]
Satterwhite has also shown/performed in group exhibitions including at MoMA PS1, the Smithsonian, The Kitchen, Rush Arts Gallery, and Exit Art.[7] He is a contributing director for the music video that accompanied Solange's 2019 visual album When I Get Home.[8]
Satterwhite's work is in the public collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Kiasma, and the San Jose Museum of Art.
In 2012 Satterwhite presented an exhibition entitled Jacolby Satterwhite at the Hudson D. Walker Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The next year, Satterwhite's exhibition Island of Treasure at Mallorca Landings in Palma De Mallorca, Spain, included the Reifying Desire video series, which was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.[3][9] Satterwhite exhibited works in the Matriarch's Rhapsody in exhibitions in Triforce at The Bindery Projects in Minneapolis, Minnesota.[10] The same year Satterwhite exhibited works from the Matriarch's Rhapsody in exhibitions including his first solo show in New York, The Matriarch's Rhapsody, Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY in January,[11] The House of Patricia, Satterwhite at the Mallorca Landings Gallery in Palme De Mallorca, Spain in February,[12] and Grey Lines at Recess Activities in New York, NY in August.[13]
In 2014 Satterwhite showed work in the exhibition "WPA Hothouse Video: Jacolby Satterwhite," curated by Julie Chae, Capitol Skyline Hotel. Chae described Satterwhite's work as "visually spectacular, strange, and boldly combines humor with darker elements". The exhibition included the work Country Ball, which is in the public collection of the Seattle Art Museum[14][15] In the same year, Satterwhite had an exhibition at OhWOW Gallery (now Morán Morán), Los Angeles, California titled How Lovely Is Me Being As I Am, the title of which he attributed to his mother's unique use of language.[16]
In 2015 and 2016, Satterwhite was part of the traveling exhibition Disguise: Masks and Global African Art. This exhibition was a collaboration between the Seattle Art Museum (on display from June 18 to September 7, 2015 in Seattle, Washington) and the Brooklyn Museum which displayed it from April 29-September 18, 2016 in Brooklyn.[17] This exhibition focused on African masquerade and how the power of the mask and costume is a proactive and playful way to engage in conversation about current social problems like class, gender, and power and to give incite into the future. The exhibition presented contemporary and historical works from the Seattle Art Museum that worked in dialogue together and were a range of mediums from video installation to photography and sculpture.[18]
In 2019, Satterwhite had his first solo museum exhibition at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, titled, "Jacolby Satterwhite: Room for Living."[19]
Satterwhite directed Pygmalion's Ugly Season, a short film accompaniment to Perfume Genius's 2022 studio album Ugly Season.[20]
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