Kameelah Janan Rasheed

b. 1985, East Palo Alto, California
Lives in New York

venue

The Amistad Research Center
6823 St Charles Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70118
Monday–Tuesday, 10 AM–3:30 PM
Wednesday, 10 AM–7 PM
Thursday–Friday, 10 AM–3:30 PM
Saturday–Sunday, 12 PM–4 PM


New Orleans African American Museum
1418 Governor Nicholls Street, New Orleans, LA 70116
Monday–Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–4 PM

neighborhood

Uptown/Carrollton
Tremé

About Spirit at the new Orleans African American Museum

Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s immersive texts, collaborative projects, and explorations in sound build on her interest in Blackness as a limitless material. Spirit, Rasheed’s project for the New Orleans African American Museum, incorporates language and texts that are at times difficult to decipher, bordering on visual glossolalia—the religious phenomenon of speaking in tongues. For the Spirit print series, Rasheed painted directly onto the surface of film and then created prints that capture the movement of her gestures enlarged and preserved by the photographic process. Focusing on covert spiritual and revolutionary practices of the South and the Caribbean, Rasheed seeks meaning in the illegible elements of Black archival records as well as spirit photography—a historic use of film that sought to capture images of spiritual manifestations.

Another series of aquatint prints pulls inspiration from the life, paintings, music, and poetry of Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900–1980), a spiritual leader who spent the latter half of her life in New Orleans. Morgan’s art and writings, especially her later work that relied on inscriptions and lacked clear compositions, speak to Rasheed’s long-standing interest in alternative languages that derive their meaning from expressive shapes and forms illegible to the uninitiated.

About Future Forms at the Amistad Research Center

Future Forms, a set of prints installed on the surface of the reading tables, is part of an ongoing investigation of Black textual production by interdisciplinary artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and is based on her research at the Amistad Research Center. In the archives, Rasheed reviewed materials on Nkombo, a New Orleans–based literary magazine published between 1968 and 1974. Rasheed was fascinated by a draft of a letter published in the journal’s final issue, which explored the life cycle of the publication as a commentary on the politics of revision, the role of the reader, [un]learning, and the importance of hyperlocal Black Louisiana culture. Taking this as a starting point, Rasheed’s work explores the materiality of language through large-scale prints formed from the annotations and markings in the archive, overlayed with handwritten notes and photocopies printed on substrates of varying opacities and reflective qualities. By engaging with this letter and other ephemera in the Nkombo archive, Rasheed reaches across time to engage in a dialogue with the magazine’s founders, activating their values and allowing them to resonate in the present.

about the artist

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is invested in the shifting ecosystems of Black epistemologies, and the agile relationships between the varied modes of reading, writing, archiving, editing, translating, publishing, reflecting upon, and arranging narratives about lived Black experiences. With interests in the generative qualities of incompleteness, leakage, dispersal, syncretism (spiritual and otherwise), and choreography (of movement, of learning, of affect), Rasheed works across an ecosystem of iterative and provisional projects. These projects include sprawling, architecturally-scaled Xerox-based collages; large-scale text banner installations; publications; digital archives; lecture-performances; library interventions; poems/poetic gestures; and other forms yet to be determined. Rasheed has exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale; Institute for Contemporary Art Philadelphia; Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev, Ukraine; Brooklyn Museum; Queens Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Bronx Museum; Brooklyn Public Library; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, and The Kitchen, New York, among others. She is the author of two artist books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019) and No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2020).

Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Spirit, 2021. Multimedia installation, dimensions variable. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. New Orleans African American Museum, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Jose Cotto.

 

Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Future Forms, 2021. Archival Inkjet prints, vellum, mylar, acetate, Xerox prints, various dimensions. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. The Amistad Research Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Jose Cotto.

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