AMERICAN ARTIST is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers black labor and visibility within networked life. Their practice makes use of sculpture, video, new media, and writing. American Artist’s legal name change serves as the basis of an ambivalent practice—one of declaration. By insisting on blackness as descriptive of an American artist and erasure, anonymity in virtual spaces where “American Artist” is an anonymous name, unable to be validated by a computer as a person’s name. Artist is currently expanding upon an investigation begun in previous artworks through the topics of incarceration, criminality, diversion, time (travel), fugitivity, and online performance.

American Artist is a 2020 resident of Red Bull Arts Detroit and a 2018-2019 recipient of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship at the Queens Museum. They have participated in residencies at Pioneer Works Tech Residency, EYEBEAM, Abrons Art Center, and have completed the Whitney Independent Study program as an artist in 2017. They have exhibited at the Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Koenig & Clinton, NewYork. They have published writing in The New Inquiry and Art21 and have been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, ARTnews, and Huffington Post. Artist is a part-time faculty member at The New School and teaches Critical Theory at the School for Poetic Computation.