Conversations at the Edge (CATE) Resource Guides

Jacolby Satterwhite is celebrated for a conceptual practice addressing crucial themes of labor, consumption, carnality, and fantasy through immersive installation, virtual reality, and digital media. He uses a range of software to produce intricately detailed animations and live-action films of real and imagined worlds populated by the avatars of artists and friends. These animations serve as the stage on which the artist synthesizes the multiple disciplines that encompass his practice, namely illustration, performance, painting, sculpture, photography, and writing. Satterwhite draws from an extensive set of real and fantastical references, guided by mythology, modernism, contemporary visual culture, and video game language to challenge conventions of Western art through a personal and political lens. An equally significant influence is that of his late mother, Patricia Satterwhite, whose ethereal vocals and diagrams for visionary household products serve as the source material within a decidedly complex structure of memory and mythology.

Satterwhite’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions and festivals internationally, including most recently at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2023); FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2022); Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh (2021); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2021); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2021); Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2019); Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); Public Art Fund, New York (2017); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017). 

Satterwhite was awarded the United States Artist Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellowship in 2016. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Satterwhite has collaborated with several musicians, including Solange Knowles in 2019 on her visual album When I Get Home, The 1975 in 2020 on the music video for “Having No Head,” and Perfume Genius in 2022 on his album, Ugly Season. Satterwhite was awarded a public art commission in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund to inaugurate Lincoln Center’s new David Geffen Hall, which debuted October 2022 in New York.

Portrait credit: Jacolby Satterwhite. Photo: Xavier Scott Marshall

Jada-Amina is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker, born and based on the South Side of Chicago. Their practice is deeply inspired by the preservation, archival, and homemaking practices of Black matriarchs. For Jada-Amina, remembrance serves as a profound ancestral technology, bridging cosmic currents and the ravines of our past. Their body of work, including sound, video, and collage, explores themes of liminality and collective consciousness by transposing cultural data from both familial archives and the public domain.

Photo Credit: Jada-Amina

Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation’s Conversations at the Edge series and SAIC Galleries.

Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth will be on view at the SAIC Galleries September 11–December 2, 2023. This survey exhibition is organized by the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University and curated by Director Elizabeth Chodos. 

Jacolby Satterwhite Gallery Representation

Mitchell-Innes & Nash

The Metropolitan Museum’s great hall to be transformed by kaleidoscopic Jacolby Satterwhite video installation
Benjamin Sutton | The Art Newspaper | April 11, 2023

Jacolby Satterwhite: A Feeling of Healing
Alice Godwin | Brooklyn Rail | December 2022

Michael R. Jackson and Jacolby Satterwhite on Marking Art in a Shifting Culture*
Lovia Gyarkye | New York Times | October 16, 2022 
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login

Perfume Genius and Jacolby Satterwhite on Their Bodily Music Collaboration
James Greig | AnOther Magazine | August 12, 2022

Jacolby Satterwhite on Seeking Utopia in ‘Pygmalion’s Ugly Season’
Angel Lambo | Frieze Magazine | June 30, 2022 

Jacolby Satterwhite’s The Matriarch’s Rhapsody
Gee Wesley | MoMA Magazine | May 11, 2022 

The artist creating mind-bending new worlds from the queer Black experience
Mahoro Seward | i-D Magazine | August 19, 2021

Love Will Find a Way Home [Album]
PAT | 2019

Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth at SAIC Galleries
This fall, SAIC Galleries presents the first major survey of Jacolby Satterwhite’s extraordinary work (September 11 – December 2, 2023).

Jacolby Satterwhite: We Are in Hell When We Hurt Each Other at the Blaffer Art Museum
We Are in Hell When We Hurt Each Other (January 20 – March 12, 2023) is a monumental video that translates the artist’s dance movements through digital bodysuits into animated Black fembot forms and other various creatures/humanoid elements. 

Art21 - Jacolby Satterwhite
Art21’s resources about Jacolby Satterwhite’s practice, including videos and texts.

Jacolby Satterwhite’s Vimeo

Visiting Artists Program Lecture Recordings from the Archive
SAIC Visiting Artists Program video and audio lecture recordings (1977–present.) Available with SAIC login credentials.

SAIC Digital Collections: Visiting Artists Program
SAIC Visiting Artists Program publicity archive and audio recordings (1977–98).