Artist Talk: Kameelah Janan Rasheed in Conversation with Taylor Zakarin

Artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Taylor Zakarin, Associate Curator of High Line Art, will discuss Rasheed’s High Line Channel exhibition, which screens from 12 – 8pm daily on the High Line at 14th Street.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her expansive practice is anchored by a focus on, and an effort to unlearn, preconceived notions of Blackness, language, and dominant cultural narratives. Rasheed employs a zine-like cut-and-paste aesthetic to combine fragments of words, images, archival footage, her own voice, and her own visage throughout her work. Her videos, installations, publications, and performances are characterized by annotations, redactions, cut-outs, glyphs, and marks. By altering and appropriating texts, she both formally and conceptually articulates a need to “rip it up,” presenting alternative stories told by traditionally marginalized voices. Through her work, Rasheed meticulously builds a visual language that presents identity as expansive, nuanced, and as the product of a fluid, non-linear process.

For her High Line Channel exhibition, Rasheed presents two recent video works, Keeping Count, annotated (2021–23) and disorganize the spirit, i (2025). Both works are a pulsing, grainy collage of archival footage, hand animation, xeroxed images, and fragments of sentences and diagrams. Errant, flickering images and text fill and then evacuate the frame. Keeping Count, annotated interrogates the certainty and purported objectivity of numbers and formulas, juxtaposing them with poetic associations, digital noise, and spiritual abstraction. Initially created as a video titled Keeping Count, the later annotated version functions as a dialogue, with the artist adding a layer of marginalia, drawings, and animated text onto her own earlier work, doubling its runtime and making it a “living document.” In doing so, Rasheed resists finite certainty, and instead embraces the incalculable, the unfinished, and the illegible. disorganize the spirit, i similarly looks to liberate the unquantifiable. The work considers how information, identity, and experiences are often abbreviated or contained by societal expectations. Rasheed draws a critical parallel between this and data compression—a process in data and computing systems that collapses and simplifies information. In response, disorganize the spirit, i proposes an “embrace of Black excess and expansion,” resisting expectations to contain and regulate emotion, presence, cognition, and sensory input.

Artist bio

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (born 1985, East Palo Alto, California) lives and works in New York, New York. Rasheed has presented work in solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Chelsea Space, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, London, United Kingdom (2026); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2023); The Atheneum at the University of Georgia–Athens, Athens, Georgia (2022); Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York (2020); School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts (2020); MASS MoCA and River Street Billboard Project, Williamstown, Massachusetts (2020); and Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, New York (2019). She has participated in major international group exhibitions including Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York, New York (2026); Circus of Life, Counterpublic, St. Louis, Missouri (2025); ECHO DELAY REVERB: American Art and Francophone Thought, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2025); To Conjure: New Archives in Recent Photography, International Center of Photography, New York, New York (2025); It Will Go On, MoCA Westport, Westport, Connecticut (2024); Language in Times of Miscommunication, Scottsdale Museum of Art, Scottsdale, Arizona (2023); Set It Off, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2022); Yesterday We Said Tomorrow, Prospect.5, New Orleans, Louisiana (2021); Unflagging, Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas (2021); Catalyst: Art and Social Justice, Gracie Mansion Conservancy, New York, New York (2019); and Predicated, The Kitchen, New York, New York (2018), among many others. She has been the recipient of prestigious awards, including the High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree, California (2024); the Working Artist Fellowship (2023); the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2022); the Creative Capital Award (2022); the Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant (Experiments with Google) (2022); and the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts (2021). Rasheed’s work is held in public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Special Collections, New York, New York; CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, Spain; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; the Rubin Foundation, New York, New York; KADIST, Paris, France, and San Francisco, California; the Center for Photography at Woodstock, extended loan to the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Woodstock, New York, and New Paltz, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York; the Center for Book Arts, New York, New York; the Leeway Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, Maryland; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; and the Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Illinois.

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Lead support for High Line Art comes from Amanda and Don Mullen. Major support is provided by Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, and Charina Endowment Fund.

Program support for High Line Art is provided by Suzanne Deal Booth, Molly Gochman, and Joyce F. Menschel. Additional support for High Line Art commissions is provided by Shane Akeroyd, Sarah Arison, Agnes Gund* and Scott Sullivan and Anna Marrs.

High Line Art is supported, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council, under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams.

Major support of High Line Art digital infrastructure is provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

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