Interracial desire, same-sex love, and racial and sexual bigotry are recurrent themes in Nayland Blake’s sculptures, drawings, performances, and videos, which reflect his preoccupation with his own racial and sexual identities. Blake explores ideas about whiteness and blackness, not only as they relate to race, but as skin itself and how that skin determines one’s identity. Blake, whose mother is white and father is black, work has often dealt with role-playing (puppets and theatricality and sado-masochism) and asks questions about the search for identity and the notion of passing for something you are not. The exaggerated role-playing and costumes of sado-masochism and drag are for Blake another type of “skin.” The bunny is a recurring theme for Blake as he expands on the rabbit and hare’s traditional portrayal as symbols of lust and fecundity. Blake’s “rabbit” has evolved into the artist’s iconographic surrogate for gay men (playing off the stereotype of the promiscuous gay man) as well as a threshold figure for black/white and male/female. Many works incorporate bunny suits that the the artist constructs for himself, such as, Starting Over (2000) is a video projection that depicts Blake wearing a bunny suit lined with weights that match his boyfriend’s total body weight and feverishly tap dancing–the weights affecting each movement, sometimes moving in tandem with Blake’s body and sometimes imposing constraints.
Blake has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and his work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale. Survey exhibitions of his work have been presented by the Center for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland in College Park, Tang Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs and Location One in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco, Henry Art Gallery at University of Washington in Seattle, Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, and Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California. HIs works have been included in group exhibitions at Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, New Museum in New York, Institute of Contemporary Photography in New York, Artists Space in New York, Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Tate Liverpool, and Center for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, among many other venues.
See more of his work here.
