Jacolby Satterwhite
in Conversation | with Derrick Adams and Tavia Nyong’o

(Never) As I Was marks the third year of the multiyear partnership between The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1, and features new work by the 2020–21 Artist-in-Residence cohort: Widline Cadet (b. 1992, Pétion-Ville, Haiti), Texas Isaiah (b. Brooklyn, NY), Genesis Jerez (b. 1993, Bronx, NY), and Jacolby Satterwhite (b. 1986, Columbia, South Carolina).

With practices spanning new media, painting, sculpture, and photography, each artist proposes dynamic ways of experiencing time, space, and locality set into this current moment of complex transformation. In response to the seismic impacts of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, for the first time in the Museum’s history the artists participated entirely in remote form for the duration of the residency. Communication was deeply mediated by the digital—this way of collaborating presented new modes of being, bending and recharting the territories of domestic, social, and studio space.

Widline Cadet’s photo and video works examine intergenerational memory, selfhood, and erasure within the diasporic experience. Texas Isaiah offers a space for mourning, celebration, prayer, and remembrance, asserting the significance of imagination in the abolition of gender while exploring the healing capacity of rest as a place of connection. Genesis Jerez’s collaged paintings layer family photographs, oil paint, and charcoal to create works that interrogate her own personal histories and reckon with questions of diasporic fracture. Jacolby Satterwhite’s refocus on painting during the residency marked a shift inward: across these paintings, he engages fantasy as a mechanism for healing and a veil for trauma, flaying open a psychic space for transcendent possibility. Each artist took on the challenge of thinking critically and durationally about the ways the tensions and possibilities of private vs. public and interior vs. exterior can be expanded, reimagined, and renegotiated through and beyond their work. The outcomes are tender and lyrical explorations of family histories, memoir, spirituality, and memory. In reflecting on their private pasts, these artists have created works that look toward what collectively lies ahead, to a world that is at once achingly the same and never as it was. 

Curatorial Essay by Legacy Russell, former Studio Museum Associate Curator, Exhibitions (now Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen). ->

(Never) As I Was is organized by Legacy Russell, former Studio Museum Associate Curator, Exhibitions (now Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen), with Yelena Keller, Curatorial Assistant, Exhibitions, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Josephine Graf, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1. Exhibition research is provided by Angelique Rosales Salgado, former The Studio Museum in Harlem and MoMA Curatorial Fellow, and Elana Bridges, former Mellon Curatorial Fellow, The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Support for (Never) As I Was at MoMA PS1 is generously provided by the Tom Slaughter Exhibition Fund and the MoMA PS1 Trustee Annual Fund.

The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artist-in-Residence program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts; Joy of Giving Something; New York State Council on the Arts; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; and by endowments established by the Andrea Frank Foundation; the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Trust; and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Additional support is generously provided by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

When one is immersed in Jacolby Satterwhite’s films and installations, a dissolution occurs. The experience stretches one’s memory and prompts a longing for spaces we've been, want to revisit, and want to reimagine. World building here is shaped by a rhizomatic approach to modernism that is Black and queer. Jacolby’s multimedia projects map us to an Afrofuturist cosmos capable of liberatory intervention where the racial and gendered boundaries of a consumerist-driven society dissipate. He creates anachronistic episodes within his digital landscapes that disturb temporal linearity, yet foreground an aliveness where past and future are subject to de- and re-composition. We see figures and symbols autonomous in flight and tangled infinitely within cyclical passageways, encompassed by deep echoes of an electronic soundtrack that beats toward a proposed utopia. In works like Shrines (2020) and Birds of Paradise (2017–19), Jacolby’s 3D animations yield spatial distortions that suspend boundaries of movement. All elements within them—architecture, schematic drawings, poems, bodies—are liberated from gravity. What feels more full than floating? 

Joining generations of peers in the Artist-in-Residence program at The Studio Museum in Harlem unifies the loop of history he has been a part of within this institution and shared community. His arrival permeates the fluctuating meanings of a remote residency. Jacolby’s hyperactive, alluring universe(s) now extend into his Brooklyn home studio, unraveling and remaking themselves within him and his three-story work/living space. His experimentation, boundless as ever, takes shape at present in the form of public art projects and large-scale commissions.  

The conclusion of Birds in Paradise, his feature-length animation series, inspired a major gesture: his return to painting. Jacolby’s origins are as a painter. Looking and listening intently, you can tell. Within his oeuvre of performance and video, his digital textures have remained painterly—a coding, sampling, and choreographed composition rooted in Fluxus, Dada, and Surrealism. Jacolby now directs our focus to evolving imagery through his hand on the canvas. In our conversation below, it’s clear his capacious thought process gives as much as it receives. 

This interview took place in March 2021.