Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth

Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth
Aug 14 – Dec 5, 2021

Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University will present the first major monographic survey of Jacolby Satterwhite’s wide-ranging practice. Curated by Elizabeth Chodos, Spirits Roaming on the Earth traces ten years of Satterwhite’s panoramic oeuvre, cataloging his evolution as an artist and exploring his creative lifeworld.

Satterwhite incorporates a broad set of real and fantastical references in his work—drawing from sources that include art history, video gaming, queer club scenes, and Black culture—to inform his 3D animated films, sculptures, electronic dance tracks, and performances. An essential moral lesson on the healing properties of human creativity emerges out of the artist’s rich mythology. Satterwhite possesses an alchemical ability to transform 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 creative energy to transform hardship into new worlds of possibility.

A world-builder himself, Satterwhite has developed a multiform gestalt that can be fully appreciated for the first time in this exhibition and its companion monograph How lovly is me being as I am, edited by Elizabeth Chodos and Andrew Durbin with text by Sasha Bonét, essays by Malik Gaines, Jane Ursula Harris, Legacy Russell, an interview with Kimberly Drew, and book design by Sonia Yoon. Taken together, the book and exhibition present an 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 inputs 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.

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.

This exhibition features contemporary art with adult content.