An endless conversation: the art and practice of Mendi + Keith Obadike

In 2001, artists Keith and Mendi Obadike put Keith's "Blackness" up for auction on eBay. While the company shut the audacious proposal down after several days, the work (part of their early black.net.art actions) was virally discussed and widely covered by the press.

Since those groundbreaking days creating pieces for an online audience, Keith, now a professor in the Department of Art at Cornell AAP, and Mendi, a professor in the College of Arts and Science's Department of Performing and Media Arts, have cocreated projects that investigate a wide swath of social topics using the tools of music, art, and language without hierarchy. This semester they are also coteaching Sound, Music, Public Space, the spring 2024 Urban Justice Lab offered as part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities series.

Source material for their work may be drawn from archives or headlines, and the performance may be presented in a gallery or along an urban street, but the work is always a conversation - one that begins between two collaborators in life and art, and then, with a turn toward the public, the dialogue continues.

Molly Sheridan:I'd like to start by going all the way back to the beginning of your collaborative work. Would you speak a little bit about what ideas and projects brought you together initially?

Mendi Obadike: We'd known each other for a long time before we started working together, and when we began, we were really interested in telling big stories that were musical and visual. We were working on the internet, because that was a place where you could bring out narrative, you could bring out music, you could bring out visual work without it being a venue that was primarily for something else. All the things had equal weight and we liked that.

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