RingShout
Satellite-based sound artwork | In progress
Description:
RingShout is a musical satellite that will orbit Earth and broadcast a continuous radio signal of original music and recorded interviews. The project gathers the voices of Black girls and women with stellar names such as Star, Estelle, Etoile, Kpakpando, Seren, Nyota, and others. Their words and stories will travel through space on a signal shaped by the call-and-response traditions of the ring shout, turning the satellite’s movement into a dance around the planet.
Concept:
RingShout extends Mendi + Keith Obadike’s work with sound and storytelling into Earth’s orbit. The project asks what it means for voices with celestial names to circle the planet, and how naming, memory, and imagination can move through space like choreography. Supported by the National Black Theatre, The Apollo Theater, the American Composers Orchestra, Cornell University, and Clockshop, RingShout draws from a growing archive of interviews. Once launched, the satellite will broadcast these voices and musical compositions into open space, forming an orbital tribute to joy, dance, and luminosity.
GuideStar - site-specific laser & music work at Seattle’s Space Needle.
Space Needle, Seattle | Site-specific laser and music installation, 2025
Description:
GuideStar transformed Seattle’s Space Needle into a monumental instrument of light and sound. Commissioned by Wa Na Wari and presented in partnership with the Space Needle and Seattle Center, the project marked the first time an artist was invited to use the Space Needle itself as a platform for their own work. For two hours, an array of vibrant, primary-colored laser beams radiated from the tower while an original ambient score enveloped the city. Seen from neighborhoods across Seattle, the installation created a shared experience of wonder and reflection, turning one of the world’s most recognizable landmarks into a luminous gathering point.
Concept:
The title comes from astronomy, where “guide stars” are created by lasers to help scientists see the heavens more clearly. In this work, the idea becomes a meditation on art’s capacity to sharpen perception and foster connection. By combining music, light, and architectural scale, GuideStar honored the human desire for clarity and belonging. The piece invited viewers to look upward and listen outward, recognizing the shared illumination that binds a community together. Both scientific and spiritual in its reach, GuideStar envisioned the night sky as a canvas for collective insight.
Book of Light -sound & light show. See video
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh | Sound and light installation, 2018
Description:
Book of Light is a sound and light work inspired by contemporary research on human bioluminescence. Commissioned by Carnegie Mellon University for its Wats:On Arts Festival, the piece was developed following the artists’ research at the Zhao Biophotonics Lab in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Data from the lab’s studies of cellular light emissions shaped the projected imagery, while an original musical score and text weave together scientific, poetic, and spiritual understandings of illumination. The result is an immersive performance that turns the gallery into a living field of sound and color, suggesting the quiet radiance that connects all living things.
Concept:
Created as a companion to Anyanwu, Book of Light continues Mendi + Keith Obadike’s exploration of light as both a scientific and cultural symbol. While Anyanwu draws from Igbo cosmology and honors the women who guided the American Civil Rights Movement, Book of Light reflects on the light within the human body and the enduring call to let that light shine. The work bridges biophotonics and song, connecting cellular luminescence to the moral and spiritual illumination evoked in the freedom anthem This Little Light of Mine. Together, these pieces form a dialogue between science and spirit, linking the microscopic and the cosmic in a shared meditation on life and liberation.
Difference Tones performed live Herbert F Johnson Museum and streamed at Buffalo AKG
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University & Albright-Knox Art Gallery | Music and video installation, 2022
Description:
Difference Tones is a 27-minute music and video work that meditates on what occurs when two sounds or ideas meet and produce something new. The piece unfolds through original music, spoken text, and slowly shifting visual abstractions created with handmade animation techniques. Premiered at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in the exhibition Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art and later presented at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, the work moves at a deliberate pace, allowing sound and image to shape one another in real time.
Concept:
Taking its title from the acoustic phenomenon in which two tones generate a third, Difference Tones considers the presence that emerges from such encounters—an additional element that cannot be ignored or undone. The work explores this idea as both an acoustic and conceptual condition: that when things meet, they leave behind something new that must be reckoned with. Through shifting fields of sound and light, the piece invites reflection on perception, tension, and the subtle material residue of experience.
SlowDrag - a public sound procession See video from St Louis
Counterpublic Triennial (St. Louis), Wa Na Wari’s Walk the Block (Seattle), and Scribe Video Center’s North Philadelphia History Festival | Public sound procession, 2023–2024
Description:
SlowDrag is a mobile sound installation presented as a procession of cars moving slowly through city neighborhoods. Each vehicle plays a remix of Mendi + Keith Obadike’s song Joy and Everything, inspired by the 1930s blues recording Black Angel Blues. In each location, the artists work with local producers and car clubs to reinterpret the piece through the city’s own sonic traditions. As the procession travels, its sound fills the streets, blending with the natural acoustics of the neighborhood to create a shared field of listening and reflection.
Concept:
Building on methods from Black vernacular culture, social practice, and sound art, SlowDrag creates a communal sonic experience that explores how sound shapes public space. The work asks how music and movement might counter the forces of erasure and gentrification. By surrounding neighborhoods in a slow love song, the piece turns mobility into an act of care. SlowDrag reimagines the city as a sounding board, where listening becomes a way to locate one another and affirm communal presence.
SlowDrag - a public sound procession See video from Philadelphia
Frequency - sculpture with sound See video
Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, Katonah, NY, Sound installation, 2022.
Description:
Frequency is a twelve-foot-long sound installation where music and vibration rise from the ground and nearby foliage. The work turns the landscape into a quiet instrument, surrounding the listener with tones that move in and out of perception. The sound seems to come from the earth itself, inviting a slower form of attention and a deeper awareness of space.
Concept:
The idea for Frequency comes from Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. In one passage, the narrator describes speaking for others on a frequency not heard by everyone. Mendi + Keith Obadike respond to this literary moment by exploring the musicality within Ellison’s language and its relation to what remains unheard or unrecognized. The piece treats sound as a way to register presence, perception, and the resonances of notions that continue to vibrate beneath everyday experience.
Timbre - sculpture with sound See video
Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, Katonah, NY | Sound sculpture, 2022
Description:
Timbre is a ten-foot-tall sound sculpture that brings together music, text, and form in what Mendi + Keith Obadike call a “tonotype.” Commissioned by the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, the piece centers on a sonic passage from Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, in which children overhear and try to interpret the speech of adults. Sound moves through and around the sculpture, blending natural, vocal, and synthesized tones that shimmer and pulse in conversation with the surrounding environment.
Concept:
Inspired by Morrison’s attention to the texture of language, Timbre explores how meaning is carried not only in words but in the qualities of sound itself. The work’s tall, golden form was modeled after the Igbo royal scepter known as an ofor, a symbol of truth and moral authority. By merging this cultural reference with Morrison’s literary voice, the artists create a sculptural instrument that amplifies both resonance and reflection. Timbre invites listeners to consider how sound, story, and material presence can speak together in acts of listening and interpretation.
The Bell Rang - projection with music See video
Mills College, Oakland, CA | Sound and light tonotype, 2021
Description:
The Bell Rang is a musical installation and projected text work created for the bell tower at Mills College, El Campanil. The piece combines the sounds of bells, piano, contrabass, and voices that sing a passage from Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s autobiography describing her 2001 vote against the authorization of military force after 9/11. The text, “The bell rang, votes were cast, and the board was full of green lights. There was only one red one,” scrolls across the tower and repeats every quarter hour, echoing the rhythm of the bell tower itself.
Concept:
Part of Mendi + Keith Obadike’s series of tonotypes, The Bell Rang invites reflection on sonic language—language that produces or invokes sound, and the practice of listening that follows. Created during their tenure as David Tudor Composers in Residence at Mills College, the work treats Barbara Lee’s words as both text and tone, transforming political speech into an unfolding vocal meditation. As light and sound recur across the day, The Bell Rang offers a space to listen to time, memory, and conviction through the textures of voice and bell.
Harmonies - sculpture with sound See video
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University | Sound sculpture, 2022
Description:
Harmonies is a sculpture inspired by nineteenth-century writings and the wind harp, an instrument often used in the poetry of that period as a symbol of listening and transformation. Made of polished aluminum and nylon string, the work mirrors its surroundings and is played by the environment. The sculpture responds to shifting light, air, and temperature, creating subtle tones that blur the boundary between structure and atmosphere.
Concept:
The language embedded in Harmonies is drawn from African American scholar Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 book A Voice from the South, where she uses musical language to imagine a future political landscape. Her vision of balance and resonance informs both the form and the experience of the piece. Harmonies invites the viewer and listener to contemplate the future while looking toward the horizon, treating sound, reflection, and motion as ways to think through time.
Compass Song - live performance and site-specific phone app for Times Square See video
Times Square Arts, New York City | App-based public sound artwork, 2017
Description:
Compass Song is an app-based public sound work created for Times Square, a lyrical exploration of how we find our way at what is often called “the crossroads of the world.” The word compass refers simultaneously to navigation, circular movement, and musical range, and each meaning informs the structure of the piece. Upon launching the app, the familiar sounds of Times Square are reimagined as a vocal performance, transforming the city into a singing landscape. As users walk through the area, a guiding voice accompanies them with poems about freedom, stories of navigation, and myths of the four directions—north, east, south, and west.
Concept:
Throughout the walk, fragments of the African American spiritual Walk with Me appear and transform, spreading the song across several blocks of the city. The voice is underscored by a continuous drone derived from the site’s latitude and longitude data, a harmony that modulates in real time as the listener moves through space. Commissioned by Times Square Arts, Compass Song invites reflection on orientation and choice, blending spiritual and technological navigation into an urban meditation on movement, direction, and the act of finding one’s path.
Love is Listening - a public listening work. Presented at Creative Time
Love is Listening
Commissioned by Creative Time | Participatory artwork, 2025
Description:
Love is Listening is a participatory artwork that explores how expressions of love persist through sound, language, and shared experience. Inspired by the world’s oldest known love song—a 4,000-year-old Sumerian text preserved on clay tablets—the project gathers 4,000 contemporary love songs as echoes of that enduring form. Intimate listening stations staffed by facilitator-DJs welcomed small groups for guided sessions drawn from a curated library of songs. Each encounter offered space for listening and reflection on how music carries memory, tenderness, and connection.
Concept:
After each listening session, participants were invited to add their voices to a growing archive of love. Some wrote reflections on postcards that became part of a collective wall of memory. Others inscribed a lyric or phrase from their chosen song onto a clay tablet, recalling the ancient Sumerian practice of preserving feeling in earth and text. Commissioned by Creative Time, Love is Listening links ancient inscriptions with contemporary sound to ask how love continues to be heard, recorded, and shared across generations.
Dialogue with DJs - public listening work, Presented at the Chicago Cultural Center and Rebuild Foundation See Video
Chicago Cultural Center and Rebuild Foundation | Participatory artwork, 2014–2015
Description:
Dialogue with DJs invites members of the public to take part in private listening sessions and conversations with a DJ using a curated archive of freedom songs. Each encounter creates a space for reflection, where personal experience meets the collective memory carried by music. The work transforms listening into an exchange about history, sound, and the ways songs continue to shape ideas of freedom.
Concept:
Commissioned by Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Black Music Research, Dialogue with DJs was presented at the Chicago Cultural Center and the Rebuild Foundation. The piece is part of Free/Phase, a suite of public sound works by Mendi + Keith Obadike. By reframing the DJ as a cultural mediator and archivist, the project turns the act of listening into a conversation about continuity, resistance, and care within Black musical traditions.
Anyanwu - fabric and sound installation See Video
Carnegie Mellon College of Fine Arts, Pittsburgh | Sound and fabric installation, 2019
Description:
Anyanwu is a sound and fabric installation composed of five large translucent banners suspended in space, each displaying the eye of a woman who helped lead the American Civil Rights Movement. Sixteen channels of sound fill the room, creating a shifting sonic environment that moves between music, voice, and ambient tone. The title Anyanwu comes from Igbo cosmology and translates as “eye of light,” a name for the sun deity associated with insight and illumination.
Concept:
The work honors Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, Claudette Colvin, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, connecting their vision and courage to the spiritual and cosmological meanings of light. Created as a companion to Book of Light, the installation links political history, myth, and listening as intertwined ways of knowing. By combining image, sound, and fabric, Anyanwu invites viewers to experience light not only as illumination but as a living presence that remembers, witnesses, and continues to see.
Beacon -public sound installation in Chicago See Video at Chicago Cultural Center See video at the Stony Island Arts Bank
Stony Island Arts Bank and Chicago Cultural Center | Public sound artwork, 2015–2016
Description:
Beacon is a public sound artwork that projects brief phrases from freedom songs into the city at morning, noon, and evening. The piece uses a large parabolic speaker to send a narrow beam of sound across the surrounding area, functioning like an acoustic lighthouse. As the focused beam sweeps through public space, listeners encounter moments of song that appear and vanish within the noise of the city.
Concept:
Commissioned by the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago, Beacon is part of Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Free/Phase suite of works. The project reflects on how sound can mark time and space, and how freedom songs continue to resonate in everyday environments. By placing these musical fragments into the rhythm of the day—morning, noon, and evening—the work treats listening as a quiet form of orientation, inviting passersby to notice how small sonic gestures can shape the experience of a place.