Artist Steffani Jemison makes performances, audio and video pieces, objects and images as well as work that integrates movement, gesture and language.  In her work, she considers: How do we know one another? How do we relate to one another? What do we desire from one another? How can find freedom with (rather than from) each other? Thinking alongside athletes, actors, musicians, educators, and scholars, Jemison uses practice-led research to inform video and sound installations, sculptures, and live works. Her installations often foreground rehearsal, labor, and process as “the work,” with multiple points of entry for engaging audiences. Writing, too, plays an important role in her practice: in 2011, she founded a small press commissioning literary work by artists of color.  Appreciating multiplicity, the work moves freely within a range of contexts, from community spaces to major museums. Bringing together the scholarship of the Black avant-garde, the archive of the Black radical vernacular tradition and an awareness of twentieth-century formalism, she breathes new life into modernist ideas.

photo: c. Nottingham Contemporary, 2017