Nayland Blake

Tear down our walls: the creative drive and reimagining ourselves. Nayland Blake shares their history as an artist, curator and educator in a talk about how crucial the creative process is in imagining new possibilities for us as individuals and communities. 

Since the late 1980s, Nayland Blake has constructed an influential body of work exploring play, eroticism, and the subjective experiences of desire, power, and loss. Inspired by feminist theory and queer subcultures, Blake addresses the contradictions of representation in sculptures, drawings, performances, and videos, particularly as it relates to their own identity as a nonbinary multiracial artist.

Nayland Blake is an interdisciplinary artist living in New York. Their work has been shown extensively and was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial, the 1993 Venice Biennale, and the landmark exhibition ​“Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994. In 2003, a retrospective of their video work was organized by the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Surveys of their work have been organized by Location One in New York and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. ​“Nayland Blake: No Wrong Holes,” a full-scale retrospective organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles opened in 2019 before traveling to the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the following year.

Nayland Blake is part of Gender Euphoria, a semester-long explosion of queer artists and art-making. These performances, exhibitions, conversations, and provocations explore how to make art and find queer joy in a state of emergency. 

“Teach it – Promote it – Create it – you are responsible for the continuation of the culture you love. Keep it alive through your actions.” — Nayland Blake

Presented in partnership with Gender Euphoria. This project was made possible by a grant from the Arts Initiative at the University of Michigan.

Series presenting partners: Detroit PBS and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Public.