Photographer
Shikeith
American visual artist working with photography addressing Black identity.
Selected Works & Key Projects
A source-backed introduction to individual photographs and significant bodies of work.
Key projects
Project · 2014
#Blackmendream
#Blackmendream is a 44-minute black-and-white experimental documentary centered on nine Black men who speak about depression, neglect, and racial trauma while facing away from the camera. The withheld faces shift attention from visual consumption to testimony and listening. Shikeith’s website identifies the work as a participatory social-media project through its hashtag and records presentations at MoMA, Seattle Art Museum, Morehouse College, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as well as its permanent collection at Wrocław Contemporary Museum. It merits selection as an early, institutionally circulated articulation of the artist’s continuing concern with Black male interiority.
View source ↗
Project · 2020
Feeling The Spirit In The Dark
Presented at Mattress Factory, Feeling The Spirit In The Dark assembled four surreal installations investigating how light, darkness, touch, and space affect Black bodies and souls. The museum describes an exhibition shaped by Blues, Jazz, Gospel, R&B, water, blue light, film, sculpture, and sound, connecting spiritual practice with the afterlife of slavery and Black queer male embodiment. Its importance lies at the project level: rather than treating photography as an isolated image, it established a multisensory installation framework through which Shikeith developed an affirming, mutable language for Black maleness and queer experience.
View source ↗
Project · 2019–2022
Notes towards Becoming a Spill
Notes towards Becoming a Spill developed across installation, performance, and publication. Aperture records a 2021 Performa commission as an experimental opera made with choreographer Morgan Bobrow-Williams, musician Rashad McPherson, costume designer Carlos Soto, and performers from New York’s queer community. Aperture’s 2022 first monograph gathers studio portraits of Black male subjects in meditation, prayer, and ecstasy. The project merits selection because its movement between live performance and photobook makes its photographic inquiry materially expansive, connecting Black masculinity, ritual, metamorphosis, vulnerability, and desire across distinct public forms.
View source ↗Selected photographs
2021
Jesus Pieces
Jesus Pieces is a 2021 inkjet print acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2023. The museum situates the image in Shikeith’s recollection of a religious household where Black popular music and church teaching were held apart. It identifies the work’s strategy as joining religious symbols and the visual language of R&B album art to address queer love and tenderness denied within both religious and musical contexts. It merits selection because a museum collection record documents both its photographic medium and its precise intervention into sacred, popular-musical, and queer visual codes.
Work source ↗
2022
Visiting Hours
Visiting Hours is a 2022 archival inkjet print acquired by The Phillips Collection in 2025. The museum states that Shikeith used expired film from the 1950s, producing the spectral glow that runs through the composition, and connects the image’s intimacy to longing for spiritual, physical, and emotional connection. Its title draws on the artist’s grandmother’s account of spirits visiting the living and on a poem by Essex Hemphill. This photograph merits selection because its subsequent acquisition and display in the Hemphill exhibition place an intimate image within a documented Black queer literary and cultural context.
Work source ↗
2021
Oche (With Candle)
Oche (With Candle), 2021, belongs to Notes towards Becoming a Spill. In Aperture, Shikeith identifies the photograph as an exploration of Black men’s spiritual and emotional interiority, memory, grief, and possible spiritual elevation through a deliberate blue palette. He describes the candle as a figure for ritual, remembrance, and illumination, and the dim setting as a sanctuary in which vulnerability and strength coexist. The photograph merits selection as a concise, artist-authored statement of the series’s photographic method: using color, ritual objects, and a portrait setting to refuse fixed accounts of Blackness and masculinity.
Work source ↗2021
Spirit In The Dark
Spirit In The Dark is a 2021 black-and-white diptych included in Shikeith’s 2022 New York solo exhibition grace comes violently. Yossi Milo Gallery describes a figure dousing themself with liquid from a blown-glass vessel shaped as a human head; the two panels provide different views of the same action. The gallery reads the doubled image as making a static photograph convey movement, temporality, and bodily cleansing in darkness. It merits selection because it clearly demonstrates Shikeith’s use of photographic sequencing and ritualized water imagery within a major multidisciplinary exhibition about transformation and grace.
Work source ↗
2019
Prince
Prince is a 2019 photograph documented in an installation view of Shikeith’s solo exhibition Rude / Emergencies. The interview source places it beside Kris in the installation and identifies the work by title and date. Its selection is warranted less by a standalone institutional interpretation than by its place in the artist’s developing exhibition language: the same interview explains Shikeith’s interest in building a visual vernacular for Black male and queer experience through figures, reflections, dirt, blue light, and other mutable materials. Prince is therefore useful as a documented photographic node within that broader practice.
Work source ↗-
2010
Education
BA, Pennsylvania State University
Shikeith received a BA from Pennsylvania State University.
Source: Shikeith Verified Sep 3, 2026
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2018
Education
MFA, Yale School of Art
Shikeith completed an MFA at the Yale School of Art.
Source: Shikeith Verified Sep 3, 2026
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2019
Series
Notes Towards Becoming A Spill at Atlanta Contemporary
Shikeith presented Notes Towards Becoming A Spill at Atlanta Contemporary; the project later developed into a Performa commission and an Aperture monograph.
Source: Shikeith Verified Sep 3, 2026
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2020
Exhibition
Feeling The Spirit In The Dark at Mattress Factory
Mattress Factory presented Shikeith’s four-installation exhibition examining light, darkness, touch, and space in relation to Black bodies and souls.
Source: Mattress Factory Verified Sep 3, 2026
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October 29, 2021
Series
Performa commission: Notes Towards Becoming A Spill
Performa presented Shikeith’s experimental opera as a commission during the 2021 Biennial, made with collaborators including Morgan Bobrow-Williams, Rashad McPherson, and Carlos Soto.
Source: Aperture Verified Sep 3, 2026
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August 16, 2022
Photobook
Publication of Notes towards Becoming a Spill
Aperture published Shikeith’s first monograph, a 112-page volume containing 70 images.
Source: Aperture Verified Sep 3, 2026
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2025
Award
VMFA Aaron Siskind Award for Photography
Shikeith received the inaugural VMFA Aaron Siskind Award for Photography.
Source: Shikeith Verified Sep 3, 2026
Collection
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The museum’s collection record identifies Jesus Pieces, 2021, as a Shikeith inkjet print purchased by MFAH in 2023.
Verified 2026-09-03Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Collection
The Phillips Collection
The Phillips Collection acquired Shikeith’s Visiting Hours, 2022, in 2025.
Verified 2026-09-03The Phillips Collection
Collection
Hammer Museum
Shikeith’s biography lists the Hammer Museum among the permanent collections holding his work.
Verified 2026-09-03Shikeith
Collection
Carnegie Museum of Art
Shikeith’s biography lists the Carnegie Museum of Art among the permanent collections holding his work.
Verified 2026-09-03Shikeith
Collection
Baltimore Museum of Art
Shikeith’s biography lists the Baltimore Museum of Art among the permanent collections holding his work.
Verified 2026-09-03Shikeith
Collection
Wrocław Contemporary Museum
Shikeith’s video page states that #Blackmendream is held in the permanent collection of Wrocław Contemporary Museum.
Verified 2026-09-03Shikeith
Shikeith: Notes towards Becoming a Spill (opens a new site)
Aperture’s 2026 editorial feature on Shikeith’s first monograph, published by Aperture in 2022. It provides a publisher-led entry point to the book and its photographic engagement with Black male subjects, ritual, desire, and ecstasy.
What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries Right Now (opens a new site)
Will Heinrich’s New York Times review of grace comes violently considers Shikeith’s New York gallery debut, including blown-glass sculpture, haint blue, five-channel video, and large photographic portraits of Black men.
Q&A: Shikeith (opens a new site)
A 2020 interview by Rafael Soldi addressing Shikeith’s photographic, sculptural, installation, and film practice; Black male interiority; haint blue; abstraction; glass; breath; and the relation between individual works and a larger world-building practice.
The Way We Live Now (opens a new site)
An Aperture feature framing Shikeith as an artist, filmmaker, and photographer whose images and video address the metamorphoses of Black men, erotic potential, and a malleable conception of Black manhood.
#Blackmendream (opens a new site)
The artist’s own video page documents this 2014 black-and-white experimental documentary, its 44-minute duration, its participatory hashtag, and its institutional presentations and collection history.
Artist Walkthrough | Shikeith: grace comes violently (opens a new site)
A recorded virtual walkthrough in which Shikeith presents the work in grace comes violently and discusses his multidisciplinary practice, followed by a public Q&A.
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