NEW YORK, NY.- Mitchell-Innes & Nash announced its representation of Tiona Nekkia McClodden, a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, photography, sculpture, and sound installations. Her work addresses and critiques issues at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and social commentary, exploring shared ideas, values, and beliefs within the African Diaspora, or what she calls “Black mentifact.”
In 2017, her seminal work, Brad Johnson Tapes, X-On Subjugation, was included in Meg Onli’s Speech/Acts at ICA Philadelphia and would go on to enter the collection of MoMA. That same year, McClodden won the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award ahead of her critically reviewed curation of Julius Eastman’s work for the Slought Foundation in 2017, which traveled to The Kitchen in 2018. A year later, she received the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, and debuted an ambitious new video installation entitled, I prayed to the wrong god for you, at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, for which she was awarded the Whitney's $100,000 Bucksbaum Prize.
In 2021, McClodden's work was featured in Okwui Enwezor's lauded exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum. Later that year she received critical acclaim for her curation of Barbara Hammer: Tell me there is a lesbian forever..., which was deemed one of the "Best Art Exhibitions of 2021" by the New York Times. In December, McClodden was awarded a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Concurrently, the artist first exhibited with Mitchell-Innes & Nash at Art Basel Miami Beach 2021, where her presentation was named one of the best booths by ARTnews. A selection of her work will be included in a show entitled Olvido, Sombra, Nada at Mitchell-Innes & Nash's seasonal exhibition space in Mexico City this February, featured alongside work by Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Lucas Samaras.
“Having the opportunity to work closely with an artist of Tiona’s caliber and ambition is critical to the gallery’s core mission to foster excellence within artistic practices that have strong political or conceptual underpinnings,” said Courtney Willis Blair, Partner and Senior Director at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. “There is a precision and boldness in the work, and she has carved herself out to be one of the most distinct voices and visual makers of her generation.”
Tiona Nekkia McClodden (b. 1981, Blytheville, AK) spent her formative years in the American South. In Georgia, after withdrawing from Clark Atlanta University, McClodden ventured into filmmaking, working largely within the punk and club scene. McClodden moved to North Philadelphia in 2006 and expanded her practice to include photography, sculpture and installation.
Her works have shown in major exhibitions, including most recently in Prospect 2021, New Orleans; New Grit: Art & Philly Now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Owkui Enwezor’s Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at New Museum, New York. Other presentations of her work have been on view at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and MoMA PS1, New York. In recent years, McClodden has won prestigious grants and fellowships, including a 2021 Warhol Foundation Arts Writer Grant, Princeton Arts Fellowship and Pew Arts Grant, while running Conceptual Fade, a project gallery and library she founded in 2020 that hosts micro-exhibitions centered on Black art and conceptual practice. Her writing has been featured on the Triple Canopy platform, and in The New York Times, Artforum, ARTnews, Cultured, and ART 21 Magazine, among other publications.
Work by McClodden is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Rennie Museum, Vancouver.
