Mendi + Keith Obadike

Mendi + Keith Obadike are interdisciplinary artists and composers whose works transform digital and civic space, linking sound, language, and light in explorations of culture, history, and technology from early Internet art to large-scale public installations.

Mendi + Keith Obadike are interdisciplinary artists and composers whose media works and musical monuments explore the intersections of identity, sound, and technology. From their early Internet-based projects, treating the web as a public space for artistic and social experimentation, to architecturally scaled public sound installations, they transform urban and digital environments into resonant sites of collective listening. Professors at Cornell University, they exhibit internationally.

Mendi + Keith Obadike are artists, composers, and writers whose work transforms buildings, city streets, and the night sky into sites for shared listening and light. Their projects combine conceptual rigor with an openness to public experience and collective participation, exploring how identity, presence, and technology shape the ways people encounter sound and media in both digital and physical space. Their practice often draws on myth, memory, and sonic traditions to consider how sound and light carry cultural and spiritual traces across time and place.

Their work is guided by a belief in the materiality of sound, its ability to hold memory and meaning, and in listening as a way to understand social and cultural relationships. They have also explored light as a subject of investigation in art, science, and mythology. Across projects, they have explored what they call ephemeral inheritances, the information and feeling carried through songs, stories, and other sonic materials. Through music, text, light, and media, they create installations and performances that invite audiences to consider how these elements connect people to history, place, and one another.

Their major projects include Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin] at The New School; Free/Phase at the Chicago Cultural Center and Rebuild Foundation; Compass Song in New York's Times Square; the multi-city public sound work SlowDrag in St. Louis, Seattle, and Philadelphia; and GuideStar at Seattle's Space Needle. From early internet-based works such as Blackness for Sale (2001), which used the web as a site for artistic and social experimentation, to large-scale sound installations, the Obadikes have expanded how public art can engage technology, architecture, and community.

Central to their practice is the concept of social filters, mechanisms that permit or deny access to specific identities in physical or digital environments. They also introduced the term acousmatic Blackness, describing the experience of Blackness through sound in the absence of a visual marker. These ideas have informed their work for more than two decades, shaping their approach to listening, public space, and the social life of sound.

Their work has been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia in Lisbon, Centro Cultural de Mérida Olimpo in Mexico, GUS Gallery in Stellenbosch, South Africa, and SALTS in Switzerland. They have participated in major exhibitions including Electronic Superhighway at Whitechapel, I Was Raised on the Internet at MCA Chicago, Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art at the Whitney, and Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art at the Albright-Knox.

They have released recordings on Bridge Records and books with Lotus Press and 1913 Press. Their honors include a Rockefeller New Media Arts Fellowship, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, the Pick Laudati Award for Digital Art, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and the David Tudor Composer Residency at Mills College. They were the first artists-in-residence at Weeksville Heritage Center, where they created Utopias: Seeking for a City, and were commissioned by the NetGain Partnership (Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and Open Society Foundations) to perform Numbers Station at MCA Chicago.

Current and upcoming projects include DreamTrain with the American Composers Orchestra, The Skeuomorph (an AI-based installation), RingShout (a musical satellite project planned for 2027), and the ongoing multi-city public sound work SlowDrag.

Mendi received a BA in English from Spelman College and a Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University. Keith earned a BA in Art from North Carolina Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University. They are professors at Cornell University and serve on the boards of Rhizome and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.