POMONA, CA.- Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner who engages with a range of processes—sprawling Xerox-based installations, large-scale diagrammatic prints, public art, publications, video, and practices based on chance—to explore the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished. Her forthcoming exhibition at the Benton Museum of Art, Worshipping at the Altar of Certainty: 1985 is a site-specific installation that uses this wide-ranging method to challenge a centralized approach to knowledge by considering how we learn.

In its first iteration at the Williams College Museum of Art, the installation consisted of large-scale prints, poems collaged directly onto the wall using excerpts of text, and a free-standing sculpture arranged throughout a temple-like rotunda, a space that served as the college’s first library when it was constructed in 1846 and that is now a gallery in Williams’s museum. Responding to the history of the site and in conversation with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges—who once imagined a library that holds all possible books and all possible knowledge—Rasheed questions the ideals of completion, comprehensiveness, and familiarity that can often typify both academic and religious institutions. In this questioning, Rasheed engages with the work of scholars Ashon Crawley and Saidiya Hartman, who, with their respective concepts of “undoneness” and “waywardness,” propose to unseat ways of thinking that have become so familiar.

For the Benton Museum of Art, Rasheed created a new iteration of the installation, including a video work, in conversation with the academic context and history of Pomona College, her undergraduate alma mater.




Kameelah Janan Rasheed was born in East Palo Alto, CA. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Rasheed has an MA in Secondary Social Studies Education from Stanford University (2008) and a BA in Public Policy from Pomona College (2006), and she was an Amy Biehl US Fulbright Scholar in South Africa at the University of Witwatersrand (2006–07). Engaging primarily with text, Rasheed works on the page, on computer screens, on walls, and in public spaces.

Rasheed’s work has been exhibited nationally at the Bronx Museum; Brooklyn Historical Society; Brooklyn Museum; Brooklyn Public Library; Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; MASSMoCA; New Museum; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; Queens Museum; Jack Shainman Gallery; and Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Bétonsalon—Centre d’art et de recherche; Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver; Kunsthalle Wien; NOME; Transmission Gallery; Artspace Peterborough; 2017 Venice Biennial; and National Gallery of Zimbabwe, among others. Her public installations include Ballroom Marfa, Brooklyn Museum, For Freedoms x Times Square Art, Public Art Fund, Moody Center for the Arts, The California Air Resources Board, and several others.

Rasheed is the author of three artist’s books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and Scoring the Stacks (digital publication - Brooklyn Public Library, BPL Presents, 2021). Her writing, including longform essays and interviews, has appeared in Active Cultures, Shift Space, The Believer, The New Inquiry, and Triple Canopy.

She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts.

The exhibition is curated by Mallory Cohen, Nidhi Gandhi, Elyse Mack, and Sinclair Spratley. The exhibition is organized at the Benton by Rebecca McGrew, senior curator, and Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, curatorial assistant, with Sam Yin Ying Chan ’22 and Madeleine Mount-Cors ’23.