Kameelah Janan Rasheed (born 1985 in California) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Rasheed's practice takes form across an ecosystem of provisional projects and experiments: large-scale text-banner installations, lecture performances, publications, sound works, library interventions, and xeroxed "architecturally-scaled collages" (
Frieze, 2018), and other forms yet to be determined. Her installations act as a means of radical self-publishing, where words are taken off the page to interact materially with architecture, stretched or fragmented "to the edge of legibility" (
Artforum, 2017). With interests in intertextuality, literacy, archiving, and ecology, Rasheed explores Black experimental poetics, vernaculars, and non-linearity as ways of narrating Black experience and thinking about modes of learning/unlearning. The artist is the founder of Mapping the Spirit, a digital archive that documents Black spiritual life in the US through interviews, photography, video, and ephemera.
In 2022, Rasheed received her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe at the Kunstverein Hannover. She participated in the Front Triennale, Athens Biennale, and Prospect New Orleans. Rasheed has previously exhibited her work at the Glasgow International; Kunsthalle Wien; Future Generation Exhibition at the 2017 Venice Biennale; the Brooklyn Museum; The New Museum, New York; MASS MoCA, North Adams; Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia; Brooklyn Public Library, among others. Rasheed received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. In 2022, she was awarded a Creative Capital Grant and the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research.
