Kameelah Janan Rasheed: we leak, we exceed

Lower Level Gallery

August 23, 2025 — April 26, 2026

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is a self-described “learner” who creates multi-media works that explore the poetics-pleasures-politics of Black knowledge production, information technologies, [un]learning, and belief formation. She often integrates found images and words alongside her own writing to create collaged wall installations and experimental video works. Across her work, Rasheed investigates the revision and life cycles of text, embracing expanded and embodied forms of writing and reading.

we leak, we exceed will activate the unique volume and multiple vantage points of the Henry’s double-height gallery, drawing together threads from physics, Black critical thought, and information theory to create an immersive environment that interrogates the spatial and social implications of compression. A common process used in data storage, spatial organization, and information systems, compression abbreviates and collapses complex ideas into more simplified forms. Rasheed questions the way compression comes at the cost of nuance and creates unrecoverable losses. She draws parallels between the compression of information and the containment of people, both physically and through the structuring and defining of identities. Through a network of video, sound, and architectural mark-making, Rasheed proposes alternatively what she calls “an embrace of Black excess and expansion” as a liberatory practice.

This presentation at the Henry builds off of Rasheed’s 2021 visit to the University of Washington for an open-ended residency organized by the Henry. During the residency, she engaged in transdisciplinary exchange with faculty and graduate students working across the sciences, arts, and humanities. The present exhibition considers the potential of traversing disciplinary boundaries to generate new ways of thinking and making meaning.

Artist Bio

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/her) explores communication practices and poetics across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; learning environments and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she was awarded a 2024 High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree; 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Rasheed is the author of seven artists' books: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext (Emerson College and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). She is on faculty at the Yale School of Art, MFA Sculpture Department, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consulting business that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions in designing expansive and liberatory learning experiences. Additionally, she founded The Little Octopus School, a roaming learning ecosystem for radical play and improvisation.

CREDITS

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator, with Em Chan, Curatorial Assistant.

Exhibitions at the Henry are made possible through the generous support of our annual sponsors, 4Culture and ArtsFund.