About.

Mendi + Keith Obadike are artists, composers, and writers. Their works sit at the intersection of art, music, and language and draw upon histories of experimental media art and performance. Their early collaborative works were pioneering pieces for the Internet. Many of these early internet works were experiments in form and explorations of Mendi + Keith’s concept of “social filters”. They define a social filter as a mechanism that allows or denies access to specific identities in physical or digital spaces. Since making these early digital works they have exhibited and performed at The New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Their projects include a series of large-scale, sound artworks that engage cities, architecture, and public space: Blues Speaker (for James Baldwin) at The New School’s University Center, Free/Phase at the Chicago Cultural Center & Rebuild Foundation, Sonic Migration at Tindley Temple in Philadelphia, Compass Song, an app for New York’s Times Square, and SlowDrag in the St. Louis Place community. Many of these projects created for physical sites ask what it means to listen in public space and explore ideas of listening communities.

Mendi and Keith have released recordings on Bridge Records and books with Lotus Press and 1913 Press. Their recent museum exhibitions include the group shows Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966) at The Whitechapel Gallery in London, I Was Raised on The Internet at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art at The Whitney Museum of American Art and Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art at The Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Mendi and Keith served as the first artist in residence at Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn where they created a commissioned work, Utopias: Seeking for a City, a sound installation. They were invited by the Netgain Partnership (Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and Open Society Foundations) to perform their work “Numbers Station” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Their other honors include a Rockefeller New Media Arts Fellowship, Pick Laudati Award for Digital Art, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, and serving as the David Tudor Composers in residence at Mills College. Their current projects include RingShout, a musical satellite, and DreamTrain, a new video and music work commissioned by American Composers Orchestra.

Keith received a BA in Art from North Carolina Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University.  He is a professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University. Mendi received a BA in English from Spelman College and a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University. She is a professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. Mendi and Keith serve on the boards of Rhizome and The Vera List Center for Art and Politics.