Project
The Black Embodiments Studio (BES) has a new, limited-edition collaboration from artist Nikita Gale and writer Mandy Harris Williams — and you can be one of the lucky few to get a physical copy.
The first 100 people who sign up here will receive the latest in a mail art series that puts Black artists in direct conversation with Black arts writers.
This postcard features a video still from an untitled project Gale is working on. “It's the scene where Dorothy sings ‘Home’ in The Wiz,” the artist explains. “Thinking about video / cinema / film / photography as means of making something infinitely accessible to vision and combining that with another tool for isolating objects / subjects in the interest of making them visible — the spotlight. The combination of the two creates a negation — an attempt to spotlight the figure that is already projected defeats the whole project of a kind of visibility that is rooted in easy distribution and consumption. And Dorothy just wants to go home."
On the back of the card, Williams poses a series of questions to get you thinking deeply about Gale’s offering — but we’re not going to give everything away…you’ll just have to sign up for the postcard.
BES conceived the mail art series to give people the opportunity to have Black art in their home — but we also want people to really experience the work, not simply possess it. Our goal is to help you think about Black art and artists in robust, complex ways. You can also hear directly from artists themselves in the lectures and conversations we’ve got on our YouTube channel.
Learn about other Artist + Writer pairings.
About the Artists
Nikita Gale
Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California, and holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Gale’s work applies the lens of material culture to consider how authority is negotiated within political, social, and economic systems.
Gale's work employs objects and materials like barricades, concrete, microphone stands, and spotlights to address the ways in which space and sound are politicized. Gale’s broad-ranging installations blur formal and disciplinary boundaries, engaging with concerns of mediation and automation in contemporary performance. Through approaching reproduction as a mechanism that connects humans to a desire for extension and amplification through both biological and industrial processes, the artist’s work points to the ways that technology not only functions as an extension and amplification of the body but also as a means by which labor and violence are displaced and concentrated. By engaging with materials that are simultaneously acoustic and protective like foam and terrycloth, Gale’s recent work considers the role of audience as a social arena and examines the ways in which silence, noise, and visibility function as political positions and conditions.
Nikita’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York); LACE (Los Angeles); Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles); Matthew Marks Gallery (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Rodeo Gallery (London); Ceysson & Benetiere (Paris); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Gale's first European institutional solo exhibition will take place at London's Chisenhale Gallery in 2022.
Gale’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Mousse, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. Nikita is a Visiting Lecturer in UCLA's Design Media Arts program and currently serves on the Board of Directors for GREX, the west coast affiliate of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems.
Mandy Harris Williams
Mandy Harris Williams is a theorist, multimedia conceptual artist, writer, educator, radio host and internet/community academic. She is from New York City and currently lives in Los Angeles. Raised between the Upper West Side and Harlem, Mandy's work focuses on the tensions that unfold between 96th street and 125th. Privilege, dis privilege, and back again in 15 minutes churning underground. Mandy's work seeks to get everybody the love that they deserve. She focuses on desirability privilege as a real and mythological market and political force. She graduated from Harvard, having studied the History of the African Diaspora, as well as the mass incarceration crisis, and other contemporary black issues. She received her MA in Urban Education and worked as a classroom teacher for 7 years in low income communities. She integrates a holistic and didactic style in to her current creative practice. Her creative work has been presented at Paula Cooper Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Art + Practice, Navel, Knockdown Center and Women's Center for Creative Work to name a few. She has a monthly radio show, the #BrownUpYourFeed Radio Hour, on NTS. She has contributed writing work to Dazed Magazine, MEL magazine, ForHarriet, and The Grio and is a frequent radio and podcast guest.
About BES
The Black Embodiments Studio is an arts writing incubator, public programming initiative, and publishing platform dedicated to building discourse around contemporary Black art. The incubator steeps participants in diverse models of arts writing for academic and non-academic audiences, and supports them as they develop their own pieces of short-form arts writing—some of which is published in the BES journal, A Year in Black Art. Throughout the year, BES invites Black artists, curators, and writers to develop public programming about their practice. Past guests include Kameelah Janan Rashid, Claire Tancons, Taylor Renee Aldridge, Will Rawls, and many others. BES is a resident program of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery and School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington.