Kelani Nichole

Last updated
Kelani Nichole
NationalityAmerican
Occupation(s)Curator, gallery founder and director
Known forFounder of TRANSFER Gallery

Kelani Nichole is a technologist and curator of time-based media and digital art active in the United States and abroad. She is the founding director of TRANSFER Gallery. Nichole has organized online exhibitions and public programs and in venues in cities like Brooklyn, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, and Mexico City, among others. [1] [2]

Contents

Education

Nichole earned a bachelor's degree in art history in 2010 and right after joined Little Berlin, a curatorial collective based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 2012, the article “The Digital Divide” by author and art theorist Claire Bishop published in Artforum magazine sparked a further investigation into the digital arts and its developments, which eventually led her to found and direct TRANSFER Gallery in 2013. [3] [4]

Career and Curatorial Projects

In 2019, she curated the group show Reconfiguring Binaries at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. The exhibition commented on the relation between contemporary art and technology culture through computer-generated image-making, artificial intelligence, and augmented realities. It featured artists Tabita Rezaire, Morehshin Allahyari, LaTurbo Avedon, Meriem Bennani, Snow Yunxue Fu, Claudia Hart, Faith Holland, Lorna Mills, Eva Papamargariti, and Lu Yang. According to the institution's website, the exhibition was supported by the New York State Council on the Arts. [5]

In a recent interview, the curator discussed the term digital arts [6]

"The biggest misconception with ‘digital art’ is that it’s any different than other means of contemporary artmaking. I’m keen to stop using the word ‘digital’ to talk about these practices.  One of the biggest challenges to the appreciation of these emerging formats is our lack of vocabulary to discuss these practices and their implications on the institutions of the artworld.  The practices I support are contemporary art practices that have a fundamentally computer-based process – the works that come from the studios are an even split of moving images/software pieces and physical objects." [6]

In 2022, she curated the first virtual exhibition in the history of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. The piece wwwunderkammer, a commissioned augmented reality work by artist Carla Gannis about world-building and alternate realities, was on display between 2022 and 2023. [7] [8] The show was later exhibited at Halsey Institute Galleries and Hill Exhibition Gallery, part of College of Charleston, South Carolina. [9]

Nichole and her TRANFER Gallery have been featured in publications including Artforum, the New York Times, and ARTnews. She helped artists to place works with prominent media art collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Thoma Foundation. [10]

Nichole founded TRANSFER Gallery, an independent exhibition space for the digital arts inhabiting a Brooklyn warehouse in 2013. The gallery, now based online, has been exhibiting international artists working on time-based media, virtual reality, GIFs, internet art, and NFTs, among other innovative media for over a decade. [1] [11] [12] [13]

She established TRANSFER Download, an international curatorial series first presented in Los Angeles, in 2016. [10] In 2019, Nichole relocated to California and opened TRANSFER's second address there. The Los Angeles iteration was more focused on public programs and community building. [14]

Her curatorial work often engages with and foster the work of women artists working in installation, computer and film-based art. Her happening series ‘gURLs’ at TRANSFER in 2013 oriented a two-year exhibition program between 2016 and 2018. The project featured 4K video works of self portraiture, video art installations, video game piece, and digital fabrications by Carla Gannis, Claudia Hart, Angela Washko, and Morehshin Allahyari, respectively. [6]

Nichole produced the video art and digital art exhibition Well Now WTF? in 2020 with more than 80 creatives hosted by the online platform Silicon Valet, a “parking lot for digital art.” Among the artists included were Faith Holland and Lorna Mills, and digital anthropologist Wade Wallerstein. [15]

In 2023, Kelani Nichole was selected as the Oolite Arts’ first Digital Arts Fellow, in Miami. For her fellowship, the curator is overseeing the Oolite's new Media Art Lab, working on a pilot project for the TRANSFER Archive, a collaborative preservation platform for digital arts on the blockchain as well as hosting office hours and the Oolite Arts' Media Art Salon Series with local artists interested in digital arts. [16] [17] [18]

Recognition

Nichole was named an ARTnews’ Innovator in 2020 and as one of Apollo Magazine’s 40 Under 40 Art & Tech Business Leaders in 2021. [19] [20]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pérez Art Museum Miami</span> Art museum in Miami, Florida

The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)—officially known as the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County—is a contemporary art museum that relocated in 2013 to the Museum Park in Downtown Miami, Florida. Founded in 1984 as the Center for the Fine Arts, it became known as the Miami Art Museum from 1996 until it was renamed in 2013 upon the opening of its new building designed by Herzog & de Meuron at 1103 Biscayne Boulevard. PAMM, along with the $275 million Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science and a city park which are being built in the area with completion in 2017, is part of the 20-acre Museum Park.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simone Leigh</span> American artist from Chicago (born 1967)

Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Lorna Mills is a Canadian net.art and new media artist who is known for her digital animations, videos, and GIFs. Mills has done work in other mediums such as installations. Her work explores how "the notion of public decency is anachronistic" Her use of GIFs are gathered through the dark net which includes 4chan, pornfails, and Russian domains. She currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carla Gannis</span> American painter

Carla Gannis is an American transmedia artist based in New York and professor at the Pratt Institute in the Department of Digital Arts until 2019 when she joined New York University. Her works combine digital imagery with well-known works of art such as paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. She received widespread attention in 2013 for her emoji version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lindsay Howard</span> American curator

Lindsay Howard is an American curator, writer, and new media scholar based in New York City whose work explores how the internet is shaping art and culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morehshin Allahyari</span> Iranian-American new media artist and activist

Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian media artist, activist, and writer based in New York. Her work questions current political, socio-cultural, and gender norms, particularly exploring the relationship between technology, history, and art activism. Allahyari’s artworks include 3D-printed objects, videos, experimental animation, web art, and publications. As a 2017 Research Resident at Eyebeam, Allahyari also worked on the concept of "Digital Colonialism"; a term she has coined since 2015.

Antonia Wright is a Cuban-American artist born in Miami, Florida. Through a multidisciplinary practice of video, performance, installation, sculpture, sound, and light, Wright responds to extremes of emotion, control, and violence as they relate to systems of power in society. Alpesh Kantilal Patel of Artforum wrote of her work, “the body is the true medium she explores.”

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her work combines aspects of ethnography and theater to create film and video projects that have touched on subjects including anarchist communities, the relationship between artwork and work, and post-military land. Her work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, the Whitney Biennial 2017, Galería Kurimanzutto, and the Guggenheim Museum. She is co-founder of Beta-Local, an art organization and experimental education program in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Transfer is an art gallery that opened in Brooklyn, New York in 2013. Transfer moved to Los Angeles in June 2019, but then its physical location closed and the gallery pivoted to a virtual one.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gretta Louw</span>

Gretta Louw is a multi-disciplinary artist who has worked with artforms as varied as digital media and networked performance, installation and video art, and fibre art. She lives and works in Germany and Australia. Her artistic practice explores the potential of art as a means of investigating psychological phenomena, particularly in relation to new technologies and the internet. Her focus is on how new digital technologies are shaping contemporary experience.

Nora Nahid Khan is a Warwick, Rhode Island-born American writer of fiction, non-fiction, and literary criticism. She was previously on the Faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design in Digital and Media. In 2022, she was appointed the executive director of Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism.

Diamond Stingily is an American artist and poet. Stingily's art practice explores aspects of identity, iconography and mythology, and childhood. Stingily lives and works in New York City.

Juana Valdés is a multi-disciplinary artist and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her works examine Afro-Cuban migration through the lens of material culture and personal experience. Valdés's work in ceramics, printmaking, video, and installation explores the colonial and imperial economies that tie the transoceanic movement of people and political ideologies across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Her installations and photographs of mass-produced decorative objects chart the history of colonial trade in conversation with her sub-Saharan and East Asian ancestry, demonstrating that the ancestry of black and brown populations is inextricably linked to trade and globalization. Valdés works with a wide range of source material that reflects the impact of global networks of exchange on contemporary issues of transcultural identity, displacement and migration, and the climate crisis.

Virginia Jaramillo is an American artist of Mexican heritage. Born in 1939 in El Paso, Texas, she studied in Los Angeles before moving to New York City. She has exhibited in exhibitions internationally since 1959.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LaTurbo Avedon</span>

LaTurbo Avedon is an avatar artist, curator, the designer and founder of Panther Modern. Their work emphasizes the practice of nonphysical identity and authorship since 2008–2009. They have explored the growing relationship between users and virtual environments. They create this body of work using the simulation tools of the current moment. The genesis of their identity occurred in various profile creation processes, eventually taking a more rigid form in Second Life.

Caitlin Cherry is an African-American painter, sculptor, and educator.

Legacy Russell is an American curator, writer, and author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, published by Verso Books in 2020. In 2021, the performance and experimental art institution The Kitchen announced Russell as the organization's next executive director and chief curator. From 2018 to 2021, she was the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Robert Strawbridge Grosvenor is an American contemporary sculptor, installation artist, and draftsman. He is known for his monumental room installations, which border between sculpture and architecture. Grosvenor is associated with minimalism.

Tina Rivers Ryan is an American curator, researcher, author, and art historian. Her expertise is in new media art, which includes digital art, and internet art. She has been a curator at the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York since 2017.

Bony Ramirez is a Dominican-born American self-taught painter and visual artist based in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and Harlem, New York. Ramirez works primarily in paintings, sculptures, and installations that comment on elements of Caribbean visual and material culture.

References

  1. 1 2 "ATC Revisited: Kelani Nichole - News/Research - Berkeley Center for New Media". bcnm.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  2. ↑ Gopnik, Blake (2022-03-03). "One Year After Beeple, the NFT Has Changed Artists. Has It Changed Art?". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  3. ↑ Bishop, Claire (2012-09-01). "DIGITAL DIVIDE: CONTEMPORARY ART AND NEW MEDIA". Artforum. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  4. ↑ Droitcour, Brian (2022-03-21). "TRANSFER Gallery". Outland. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  5. ↑ "Refiguring Binaries". Refiguring Binaries. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  6. 1 2 3 Niio (2016-08-30). "A Conversation With Kelani Nichole of Brooklyn's TRANSFER Gallery (Part 2)". Niio Blog. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  7. ↑ "Pérez Art Museum Miami Debuts Virtual Exhibition Gallery, Launches New Website and First Bilingual Digital Museum Collection • Pérez Art Museum Miami". Pérez Art Museum Miami. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  8. ↑ "Welcome to the wwwunderkammer • Pérez Art Museum Miami". Pérez Art Museum Miami. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  9. ↑ "WWWUNDERKAMMER". Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  10. 1 2 "Curating in the Blockchain Landscape". brooklynrail.org. 2021-06-07. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  11. ↑ "Kelani Nichole on pioneering a new type of gallery". thecreativeindependent.com. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  12. ↑ "Kelani Nichole". HOLO. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  13. ↑ "Can blockchain offer artists and galleries a way to work together? – Looks Like New". 2023-12-15. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  14. ↑ Ishikawa Sutton, Mai (December 2, 2023). "Kelani Nichole on Building Trust and Cooperation in Experimental Media Art". C/Change. Retrieved February 2, 2024.
  15. ↑ "Are Digital Galleries Here to Stay?". May 5, 2020. Retrieved February 2, 2024.
  16. ↑ Salazar, Andrea (2023-05-23). "Oolite Arts names Digital Arts Fellow to foster arts community innovation | Biscayne Bay Tribune#" . Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  17. ↑ "Kelani Nichole". Oolite Arts. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  18. ↑ Francischine, Tyler. "Oolite Arts Salon Series Rethinks the Tangled Love Triangle Among People, Art, and Technology". Miami New Times. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
  19. ↑ "The Innovators List: 51 Trailblazers, Dreamers, and Pioneers Transforming the Art Industry". ARTnews. October 12, 2020. Retrieved February 2, 2024.
  20. ↑ "Kelani Nichole | Apollo 40 Under 40 Art & Tech | The Business". Apollo Magazine. 2021-09-20. Retrieved 2024-02-02.
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