The New York Times Style Magazine recently featured an article, What Does It Mean to Be a Young, Black Queer Artist Right Now? , which centered around a photo and video shoot that Shikeith MFA ’18 organized and shot.
On the project, Shikeith says,
I pitched this idea in May 2021, [after] the 30th anniversary of Marlon Riggs’s “Tongues Untied.” I wanted to bring in this specific community of people that I felt were intersecting and collaborating — or had known of each other or influenced each other — who all happen to occupy these identities, very much like the community that Riggs and Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam had. And even back before that: Think about the Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes¹⁴ and Richard Bruce Nugent¹⁵ — all these people who’d been marking their time through collaboration. I felt like that hadn’t really happened with our community yet, and I wanted to celebrate one another, in the midst of all of our individual successes.
Shikeith, MFA ’18
What followed was a project that was “‘almost a double-edged sword’: A conversation with the creatives who are making the culture — and questioning it, too.”
Read the full article here.
Photo Credit: Clockwise from left: DonCHRISTIAN JONES, 32, musician and visual artist; ABDU ALI, 32, musician, writer and artist; JEREMY O. HARRIS, 33, writer and actor; JONATHAN LYNDON CHASE, 32, visual artist; MILES GREENBERG, 24, visual artist; BRONTEZ PURNELL, 40, writer and musician; DEVAN SHIMOYAMA, 32, visual artist; HUGH HAYDEN, 38, sculptor; SAEED JONES, 36, poet; JAQUEL SPIVEY, 23, actor; JONATHAN GARDENHIRE, 29, visual artist; CLIFFORD PRINCE KING, 28, visual artist; ERIC N. MACK, 35, visual artist; EDVIN THOMPSON, 29, fashion designer; D’ANGELO LOVELL WILLIAMS, 29, visual artist. Photograph by Shikeith. Styled by Ian Bradley