Nayland Blake is an artist, writer, educator and curator. Born in New York City in 1960, they attended Bard College and then California Institute of the Arts. After receiving their M.F.A., they moved to San Francisco in 1984. They have had one-person exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; University Art Museum, Berkeley; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College. Their works are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and many others. They have authored numerous catalogue essays, as well as articles and interviews appearing in such publications as Artforum, Out, Interview, and Outlook. In 1995 they were co-curator, with Lawrence Rinder, of the landmark exhibition “In A Different Light,” at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, the first museum exhibition to examine the impact of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer artists on contemporary art. In 2017 they curated “Tag, Propositions on Queer Play and the Way Forward” at the ICA Philadelphia.
At MacDowell, Nayland executed six assemblages and more than 100 drawings during their residency, several of which will be included in their retrospective at the ICA/LA in the fall of 2019.
