AMERICAN ARTIST creates work that considers black labor and visibility within networked life. Their practice makes use of sculpture, installation, and new media to reveal historical dynamics embedded within contemporary culture and technology. Their legal name change to “American Artist” serves as the basis of an ambivalent practice—one of declaration: by insisting on the visibility of blackness as descriptive of an American artist, and erasure: anonymity in virtual spaces where “American Artist” is an anonymous name, unable to be googled or validated by a computer as a person’s name.

In 2020, the nation witnessed political turmoil amidst a global pandemic. After the death of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, Artist created the work Looted to comment on the boarding up of New York’s major art museums to protect their property. Looting has formed the basis of many museum collections in the United States. Through this project, Artist asks: who really owns the work? Who has access to the museum? And who is considered a threat?

Artist was a resident at Red Bull Arts Detroit and a 2018-2019 recipient of the Queens Museum Jerome Foundation Fellowship. They are a former resident of 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. Their work has been featured in the New York Times, Artforum, and Huffington Post. They have published writing in The New Inquiry and Art21. Artist received an MFA from the New School in 2015. Artist is a part-time faculty at Parsons School of Design and teaches critical theory at the School for Poetic Computation.