Critical Voices on the Work of Mendi + Keith Obadike

Critics, artists, and curators have reflected on the work of Mendi + Keith Obadike across sound, performance, and media. The following selections highlight how their practice has been discussed in artistic, scholarly, and public contexts.

Critical Reception

“100 Best Artworks of the 21st Century”
— ARTnews (Blackness for Sale, Ranked #30)

“The loveliest project.” — Siddhartha Mitter, The New York Times, on SlowDrag

“The Obadikes, who have staged sound-based activations in Philadelphia before, are using cars and music as a North Philly love language.” — Peter Crimmins, WHYY / The Philadelphia Tribune

“More nuanced is Mendi + Keith Obadike’s brilliant piece The Interaction of Coloreds (2002/2018)... It draws connections between whiteness, HTML coding, and Josef Albers’s color theory... As Programmed proposes, what’s old is always new again.”
— Alex Greenberger, ARTnews

“Mendi Obadike and Keith Obadike … offer future visions of what spoken word might sound like on earth, in the atmosphere and the outer limits.… Dense abstractions … mutated to the point of being alien and strange, yet beautiful and refined.” —  Michael G. Nastos, All Music 

“Their retro-futurist assemblage of story and song, music and movement short-circuits the gap between tradition and modernity in an enthralling contemporary Black aesthetic.”
— Tavia Nyong’o, critic and scholar, on Four Electric Ghosts

“By making audible—and indeed beaming into public space—melodies from spirituals and freedom songs that emerged out of slavery and social injustice, the Obadikes recover histories often obscured or denied within the public sphere.”
— Gascia Ouzounian, Evental Aesthetics, on Free/Phase

“The artists’ voices perform a charged erotics of data in their incantatory recitation of numbers.”
— Soyoung Yoon, Documentary Audibilities (Fall 2017), on Numbers Station

“I was startled. Not only hadn’t I realized the object was an AI speaker—the tone and rhythm of its language were strikingly different from the voices of Google Assistant or Siri. This AI’s answers were fluid, lyrical, poetic, and often ended with a question.”
— Mika Ono, UC San Diego Today (on The Skeuomorph)

“Blackness for Sale explores the language of color and its relationship to art, the body, and politics... It can be read as a critique of colonial encounters and the commodification of Blackness, from the auction block to online circulation.”
— Simone Browne, Rhizome.org, Net Art Anthology

Endorsemments from Artists, Writers & Musicians

“Four Electric Ghosts set a new plateau for multimedia work by this generation of Afrofuturist performer-conceptualists... What more could we ask for from a night at the theater than dance, music, sex, romance, mysticism, and a newfangled notion of global village literature?”
— Greg Tate, writer and critic

“In this multimedia performance... all was sung, told, and danced in the style of Grace Jones, June Tyson, Laurie Anderson, TV on the Radio, Takashi Murakami, and Urban Bush Women. My jaw was on the floor.”
— Vijay Iyer, Artforum, Best of the Year Issue

“Mendi and Keith Obadike both recover and reenact faceted dimensions of this conjure universe permeated by manifold American avant-garde traditions... The voices of Zora Neale Hurston, Yoko Ono, Sun Ra, and High John the Conqueror appear as remedial folk instruction manuals for navigating contemporary complexity.”
— Terry Adkins, artist, on Big House Disclosure

“Mendi + Keith Obadike are 21st-century sonic griots channeling spirits worthy of Larry Neal’s bebop ghosts and the interplanetary rhythms of Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders... They remind us of the sacredness of the quotidian and the ancestral voices that refuse to be silenced.”
— Kinshasha Holman Conwill, museum director, on Big House Disclosure