Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Artist & Guggenheim Fellow

Bridwell Library is honored to host internationally exhibited artist and Guggenheim Fellow, Kameelah Janan Rasheed. She will discuss the lifecycles of language and publications. Rasheed's practice includes books, large-scale installations, performances, code, and other forms yet to be determined. With an interest in Black experimental poetry, mysticism, and ecology, Rasheed will explore the book form as a generative space to consider our relationship to permanence and learning.

We are further delighted that Daisha Board, Founder and Curator of Daisha Board Gallery, will be the evening’s Moderator and Discussant.

ABOUT KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/her) explores communication practices and poetics across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; learning environments, and other forms yet to be determined.

Most recently, she was awarded a 2024 High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree; 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022).

Rasheed is the author of seven artists' books: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext (Emerson College and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021).

She is on faculty at the Yale School of Art, MFA Sculpture Department, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consulting business that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions in designing expansive and liberatory learning experiences. Additionally, she founded The Little Octopus School, a roaming learning ecosystem for radical play and improvisation.

She is the founder of KJR Studios. Currently headquartered in Brooklyn with seasonal projects in Berlin and Johannesburg, KJR Studios is an always evolving, leaky container for learner Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s interdisciplinary and feral exploration of her curiosities.

ABOUT DAISHA BOARD GALLERY

Daisha Board Gallery is a contemporary art gallery representing BIPOC artists, LGBTQ+ and artists with disabilities locally and abroad in various mediums that include mixed media, sculpture, photography, installations, performance art and digital media. Located in the evolving West Dallas area, near the Tin District, Trinity Groves and the Belmont Hotel. Daisha Board Gallery focuses on optimum visibility, inclusion and acquisitions for marginalized artists.

Daisha Board has curated, juried and collaborated on exhibitions and projects in both traditional and non-traditional art spaces throughout Dallas.