American Artist

AMERICAN ARTIST (b. 1989 Altadena, CA, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers black labor and visibility within networked life. Their practice makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing. American Artist’s legal name change serves as the basis of an ambivalent practice—one of declaration: by insisting on blackness as descriptive of an American artist, and erasure: anonymity in virtual spaces where “American Artist” is an anonymous name, unable to be validated by a computer as a person’s name.

Artist is a 2018-2019 recipient of the Queens Museum Jerome Foundation Fellowship. They are a former resident of Abrons Art Center and EYEBEAM and completed the Whitney Independent Study program as an artist in 2017. They have exhibited at the Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Koenig & Clinton, New York. They have published writing in The New Inquiry and New Criticals and have been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, ARTnews, and Huffington Post. Artist is the art director of the arts and politics publication unbag.