Jacolby Satterwhite

Through performance, video, 3D animation, installation, and sculpture, Jacolby Satterwhite explores themes of memory, desire, and ritual. He is interested in process as a metanarrative: the narrative between past, present, and future, and how that process relates a broad, shared experience. Often using his mother’s drawings as a resource (she created thousands of schematics and inventions centered on consumer culture, medicine, sex, astrology, and philosophy), he propagates her two-dimensional gestures and contextualizes related themes. His visual dialogue reads something like an extraterrestrial journal, a poetic scape where there is no sense of physical place and no parameters of time. Satterwhite’s methods are radical, and the imagery surreal, yet he maintains a visual course of formalist aesthetics and composition.

Jacolby Satterwhite (b. 1986, Columbia, SC) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (2008), and a MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2012). In 2013, he was a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and in 2016 he received the United States Artist: Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellowship. Recently, his work has show at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2021); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2021); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2021); Fabric Workshop & Museum, Philadelphia, PA (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2019); Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2019); and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN (2019). His work has also been included in exhibitions at many prestigious institutions, including the Bronx Museum, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, TX; Serralves Museum, Porta, Portugal; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Fowler Art Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA. Satterwhite’s work is included in public collections at the Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.