Richard Jonathan Nelson
Hearing hooves the five winds lead to distraction, 2023
Jacquard, handwoven, hand-dyed cotton, applique, pearls, and digital print cotton
Richard Jonathan Nelson uses textiles, video, and digital manipulation to create alternative worlds of speculative identity. His maximalist work layers images of the natural world with reference to hoodoo, queer culture, and Afro-Futurism.
In Nelson’s work, the Black body is reimagined as a site for futuristic, creative progress. Toward these ends, Nelson is developing a hybrid art made through digital processes and traditional craft practices such as embroidery, weaving, and quilting. The long history of Black craft making in the American South, and especially, in South Carolina’s Low Country is brought into the present and is carried into the future in Nelson’s work. He pictures Black people as visually and culturally complex subjects, far removed from historical stereotypes of servants who never exhibit any agency. Nelson’s ambition is to create Black Diasporic images that sit between dichotomies of Blackness: an expansive, unknowable void to non-Black people and a chromatically intense generator of culture.
“Nelson’s work is imbued with maximalism, with each corner of the work covered in a way that makes every viewing a discovery — a chance to ponder a different realm within the piece.” –Kristie Song, “‘Fight and Flight’ Captures Artistic Responses to the Pressures of Bay Area Life”, KQED.
Born in Savannah, Georgia, Nelson moved to the Bay Area to pursue an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. He lives in Oakland.
Photos courtesy of Henrik Kam.
ARTIST BIO
Richard-Jonathan Nelson is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses textiles, video, and digital manipulation to create alternative worlds of speculative identity. His work is multi-layered, chromatically intense and mixes images of the natural world with reference to hoodoo, queer culture, and Afro-Futurism. He uses his constructed worlds to examine the overlapping spheres of culturally perceived identity and the emotional memory of what it means to be a queer black man. Thereby creating a limbic space free from the weighted accepted western cultural reality, and able to examine the unspoken ways systems of power persist.
Born in Savannah, Georgia (1987) and working in Oakland, CA Nelson received his MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. His work has been exhibited at Southern Exposure, Embark Gallery, Root Division in San Francisco, and Aggregate Space in Oakland.
