Nayland Blake

Nayland Blake has spent nearly four decades building a body of work that refuses to sit still — sculpture, drawing, video, performance, all of it circling questions of desire, power, and the slippery business of representation. The materials range from gingerbread to chrome to fur, each chosen for what it can hold and what it might betray.

Informed by feminist theory and queer subcultures, Blake's practice addresses identity as a nonbinary multiracial artist with the same rigorous attention they bring to form. Major exhibitions include the 1991 Whitney Biennial, the 1993 Venice Biennale, and a 2019 retrospective at the ICA Los Angeles that traveled to MIT.

They live and work in New York. The studio remains the center — a place where restraint chairs, video puppets, and bronze sculptures share the same grammar of investigation.