Mendi + Keith Obadike

About

Short Bio (35 words)

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..

Short Bio (61 words)

Mendi + Keith Obadike are interdisciplinary artists whose media works and musical monuments explore the intersections of identity, sound, and technology. From their pioneering Internet-based projects—treating the early 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.

Longer Bio (513 words)

Mendi + Keith Obadike are artists, composers, and writers whose pioneering work transforms buildings, city streets, and even the night sky into instruments of shared listening. Their projects combine careful conceptual inquiry with an openness to public experience and collective participation, exploring how identity, presence, and technology shape the ways audiences encounter sound and media in both digital and physical public spaces.

Their major works 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 (St. Louis, Seattle, Philadelphia); and their largest public work to date, GuideStar at Seattle’s Space Needle. From early Internet art interventions such as Blackness for Sale (2001)—which explored the web as a public forum for art and dialogue about race and commerce—to monumental sonic architectures, the Obadikes have continually expanded notions of how public art can engage sound, 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—which has informed their work for more than two decades. They also coined the term acousmatic Blackness—the experience of Blackness through sound in the absence of a visual marker—as a framework for understanding how Black presence is heard, felt, and mediated through technology and public space.

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 (London), Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia (Lisbon), Centro Cultural de Mérida Olimpo (Mexico), GUS Gallery (Stellenbosch, South Africa), and SALTS (Switzerland). They have participated in major group 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. 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 (American Composers Orchestra), The Skeuomorph (an AI-based installation), RingShout (a musical satellite with a launch target of 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.