Spirits Roaming on the Earth
August 14–December 5, 2021
This exhibition is the first major monographic survey of Jacolby Satterwhite’s panoramic oeuvre. Born in 1986 in Columbia, South Carolina, Satterwhite engages a wide range of media to create layered and exuberant 3D animated videos, virtual reality environments, immersive installations, sculptures, electronic dance tracks, and performances that draw on a broad set of real and fantastical references and diverse influences that include modernism, video gaming, queer theory, mythology, and Black culture.
Satterwhite’s prolific and multifaceted practice reveals an essential moral lesson on the healing properties of human creativity. He possesses a special ability to turn existential uncertainty into a generative engine of resilience, reinvention, and celebration—a quality he shares with his late mother and muse, Patricia Satterwhite, who leveraged her own irrepressible creativity to transform hardship into new worlds of possibility. A world-builder himself, Satterwhite’s multiform gestalt can be fully appreciated for the first time through this exhibition and companion monograph How lovly is me being as I am that is edited by Elizabeth Chodos and Andrew Durbin with contributions by Sasha Bonét, Kimberly Drew, Malik Gaines, Jane Ursula Harris, Legacy Russell, and is designed by Sonia Yoon. Taken together, these projects examine how memory is a source of power, creativity is a form of repair, and circularity is a wellspring of eternal vitality.
This major survey presents Satterwhite’s extraordinary creative trajectory that cannot be fully understood only through its component parts. Mapping this holistic view of Satterwhite’s singular ability to masterfully synthesize personal, theoretical, and pop-cultural influences across a wide range of materials and genres with unmatched skill and dexterity affirms his position as one of the preeminent makers and thinkers of our time.
Curated by Elizabeth Chodos, Director of the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art.
This exhibition was made possible with support from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Frank Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry, Center for Arts and Society, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, and with major support from The Andy Warhol Foundation, the College of Fine Arts, Regina and Marlin Miller, and other individual donors.
