Shikeith (1989)
The language must not sweat, 2018
About:
Shikeith (b. 1989, Philadelphia, PA) received his BA from The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA for Integrative Art (2010) and his MFA in Sculpture from The Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2018). His work attempts an assemblage of personal truths and wonder that focuses on the metamorphoses of Black men, especially within a society that denies these men their erotic and reconciliatory potential and capital. It is the interior he considers—his own, as well as, other Black men or masculine people through emphasizing portraiture, sculpture, and film making to examine the fantastic as it relates and complicates personal autobiography and self-making.
Brush your blues, 2017
The suite of prints by the photographer Shikeith explore the desire, visibility and representation of black men. His 2018 image, “The Language Must Not Sweat,” titled after a phrase Toni Morrison used in a 1981 interview, captures a series of books on black life stacked on the perspiring head of an African-American man.
Violence is man re-creating himself, 2018
The image is a metaphor for how “very often, to get to where we want to go many of us have to operate in conditions that only function through conformity,” said Shikeith, 29. “Sometimes, I feel like I am going to war when I pick up a camera, like there’s an urgency in the logic behind my envisioning of a malleable black manhood,” he added, referring to the images he sees as combating popular stereotypes.(NYT August 2018)
Portrait of a black man, 2013
“It is necessary that all black males snatch back their narrative and write from their own individual perspectives. Knowing you are free to reside in your masculinity however you see fit I believe will save a lot of lives,” (quote artist)