Mendi+Keith Obadike's visit to CSULA is made possible
through the CSULA Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics and
the Virginia E. Smith Fund for Poetry and Poetics.
Mendi+Keith Obadike at CSULA
Thursday, Nov 9, 6:30pm
Location TBA. Multimedia performance.
Mendi+Keith Obadike to Perform November 9, 2006
Mendi+Keith Obadike will be on campus on
Thursday and Friday, November 9-10. They will give a
multimedia performance at 6:30 on Thursday, November 9,
with other appearances to be announced (along with the
location of the presentation on the 9th).
Mendi+Keith Obadike are interdisciplinary artists whose
music, live art, and conceptual Internet artworks have
been exhibited internationally.
Their album The Sour Thunder was released on Bridge
Records. Their writing and art projects have been featured
in the film Take These Chains, in periodicals
(including Art Journal, Artthrob, Meridians,
Black Arts Quarterly, and Tema Celeste), and
in the anthology Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Arts
and Culture (MIT Press, edited by Paul D. Miller).
Their work generated much discussion online and offline
when they offered Keith's blackness for sale on eBay in
2001.
In 2002 Mendi+Keith premiered their Internet opera The
Sour Thunder which was the first new media work
commissioned by the Yale Cabaret and they launched The
Interaction of Coloreds (commissioned by the Whitney
Museum of American Art). In 2003 Keith was sound designer
and composer for Anna Deavere Smith’s play Twilight:
Los Angeles 1992 at the Lincoln Center Institute, and
Mendi's poetry was featured at the Studio Museum in Harlem
in response to an exhibition of visual artist Gary
Simmons’ work. Also in 2003 they launched The Pink of
Stealth, an Internet/ DVD surround sound work
commissioned by the New York African Film Festival and
Electronic Arts Intermix and The Sour Thunder was
broadcast internationally from 104.1 fm in Berlin. Their
works in progress include a new installation and album
entitled TaRonda Who Wore White Gloves supported by
a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship and an Internet opera
entitled Four Electric Ghosts, for Toni
Morrison’s Atelier at Princeton University.
Most recently, Keith was awarded a Connecticut
Critics’ Circle Award for his sound design work at the
Yale Repertory Theater and Mendi's new book Armor and
Flesh (Lotus Press) won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry
Award. Keith received a BA in Art from North Carolina
Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale
University. Mendi received a BA in English from Spelman
College and a PhD in Literature from Duke University.
(Information courtesy blacknetart.com)
For more information, call the Cal State L.A. English Department at (323) 343-4140.
