Mendi+Keith

Mendi + Keith Obadike make music, art and literature. The Washington Post has called their work “daring, funny and innovative.” Their projects have been featured on radio stations (including WBAI-NY, WHUR-DC and WNYC), in periodicals (including Art Journal, Artthrob, Meridians, New Music Box, Black Arts Quarterly, Leonardo Electronic Almanac and Tema Celeste), and survey texts including New Media Art (Taschen) and Internet Art (Thames and Hudson). A series of Mendi and Keith’s media works are featured in the anthologies Re: skin and in the forthcoming Sound Unbound (both on M.I.T. Press). In a 2001 performance work they offered Keith's blackness for sale on eBay with a list of benefits and warnings. Critic Kodwo Eshun described the work as “the most talked about artwork on the internet.” and “A brilliant example of double consciousness in the age of normalized new media.” The text from this work traveled widely. It has been reprinted in magazines in Ireland, South Africa, and Norway, and included in the Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture. In 2002 Mendi + Keith premiered their Internet opera The Sour Thunder, a live streaming performance which was the first new media work commissioned by the Yale Cabaret. The album from this work was released by Bridge Records and was broadcast across Europe from 104.1 fm in Berlin. That same year they launched The Interaction of Coloreds, an online race verification system (commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art). In 2003 Keith was sound designer and composer for Anna Deavere Smith’s play Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 at the Lincoln Center Institute, and Mendi's poetry was featured at the Studio Museum in Harlem in response to an exhibition of visual artist Gary Simmons’ work. Also in 2003 The New York African Film Festival and Electronic Arts Intermix commissioned a new surround sound piece and online game The Pink of Stealth. This work was recently featured at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. In 2004 Mendi’s book of poetry Armor and Flesh (Lotus Press) received the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize and Keith received a Connecticut Critic’s Circle Award for Outstanding Sound Design for work at the Yale Repertory Theater. Critic Houston Baker said of Mendi’s book “These cleanly-wrought poems turn the world upside down, inside out. “ The Whitechapel Gallery of London commissioned a new video work in 2005 and in 2006 they created a live streaming sound work from the Armory Show in New York commissioned by The Franklin Furnace. They recently completed Big House / Disclosure, a 200 hour house song / sound installation about slavery for Northwestern University for which they received a Pick-Laudati Award. Their other honors include receiving a Rockefeller New Media Arts Fellowship and being chosen by Toni Morrison as artist in residence at her Atelier during her final year at Princeton. Their current projects include producing text-sound compilation album featuring Guillermo Brown, DJ Spooky, Shelley Hirsch, Vijay Iyer, Paul Lansky, George Lewis, John Link, and Tracie Morris. They are also developing new work with dancer and Bill T. Jones alum Ayo Berner-Jackson. Keith received a BA in Art from North Carolina Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University. He is an assistant professor in the College Arts and Communication at William Paterson University. Mendi received a BA in English from Spelman College and a PhD in Literature from Duke University. She is a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.