Jacolby Satterwhite

Biography

Jacolby Satterwhite is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses video, performance, 3D animation, drawing, fibers and printmaking to explore themes of memory, desire, and personal and public mythology. In his video works, Satterwhite creates fantastical digital landscapes populated with multiple, costumed avatars of himself, engaging with hand-drawn objects and text as extensions of the body, in a seamless exchange between live performance and constructed worlds. Satterwhite's computer-generated realms—densely layered with proliferating drawings, objects and performances—encompass animated narratives of personal memory and identity.

Satterwhite was born in 1986 in Columbia, South Carolina. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2023, his six-channel video installation, A Metta Prayer, was on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall. Recent solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2023); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2022); Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2020); Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2019); Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2019); and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York (2018).

Satterwhite was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and the following selected international group exhibitions: Worldbuilding: Video games and art in the digital era, Centre-Pompidou Metz, France (2023-24); I'll Be Your Mirror, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2023); FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Ohio (2022); Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2021); Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions, and the Social Environment, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2021); New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Is This Tomorrow?, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); First Look: Artists’ VR, New Museum, New York (2017); Sundance Film Festival (2014); and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2012-13), Grey Art Gallery, New York University (2013), The Studio Museum in Harlem (2013-14), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014-15), and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2015).

Satterwhite was a recipient of the United States Artists Award in 2016 and was an Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem from 2021-22.

Satterwhite lives and works in New York.