Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth
Miller ICA
at Carnegie Mellon University
Purnell Center for the Arts
5000 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University will present the first major monographic survey of Jacolby Satterwhite’s work. Curated by Elizabeth Chodos, Spirits Roaming on the Earth traces ten years of the artist’s panoramic oeuvre. Satterwhite incorporates a broad set of real and fantastical references in his work—drawing from sources that include modernism, mythology, video gaming, queer theory, and Black culture—that inform his 3D animated videos, sculptures, electronic dance tracks, and performances. His wide-ranging practice evokes an essential moral lesson on the healing properties of human creativity as Satterwhite transforms existential uncertainty into a generative engine of resilience, reinvention, and celebration. This ability is something he shares with his late mother and muse, Patricia Satterwhite, who leveraged her own irrepressible creative energy to transform hardship into new worlds of possibility. A world-builder himself, Satterwhite has developed a multiform gestalt that can be fully appreciated for the first time in this exhibition and its companion monograph How lovly is me being as I am, that is edited by Elizabeth Chodos and Andrew Durbin with contributions by Sasha Bonét, Malik Gaines, Jane Ursula Harris, Legacy Russell, Kimberly Drew, and book design by Sonia Yoon. Taken together, the book and exhibition present the artist’s extraordinary creative trajectory, which cannot be fully understood only through its component parts. Mapping this holistic view of Satterwhite’s singular ability to masterfully synthesize personal, theoretical, and pop-cultural influences across a wide range of materials and genres with unmatched skill and dexterity affirms his position as one of the preeminent makers and thinkers of our time.
Jacolby Satterwhite was born in 1986 in Columbia, South Carolina. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts, Baltimore and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Satterwhite’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions and festivals internationally, including most recently at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2021); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2021); Fabric Workshop & Museum, Philadelphia (2019); Pioneer Works, New York (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); Public Art Fund, New York (2017); San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco (2017); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017). He was awarded the United States Artist Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellowship in 2016. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. In 2019, Satterwhite collaborated with Solange Knowles on her visual album, “When I Get Home.”
LINK: Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth
LINK: Jacolby Satterwhite
