Artists

Jacolby Satterwhite is an American contemporary artist celebrated for a conceptual practice that merges immersive installation, virtual reality, and digital media to explore themes of ritual, fantasy, memory, queerness, and world-building. Using a range of 3D animation software alongside live-action film, he creates intricate, cinematic universes that incorporate friends, collaborators, and recurring symbolic figures. These works synthesize multiple disciplines—including illustration, performance, painting, sculpture, photography, and writing—into kaleidoscopic environments that both disrupt the conventions of Western art and celebrate Black queer identity and freedom.

A significant influence on his work is his late mother, Patricia Satterwhite, whose visionary household diagrams and ethereal vocals serve as foundational source material. Her presence threads through Jacolby’s elaborate digital worlds, forming a deeply personal structure of memory, mythology, and invention.

Satterwhite received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. His work has been featured in major exhibitions and institutions worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2023–24); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2023); FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial (2022); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); Gwangju Biennale (2021); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2021); Fabric Workshop & Museum, Philadelphia (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2018); the New Museum, New York (2017); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018); Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017); and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017), among many others.

His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, among others. He was awarded the United States Artists Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellowship in 2016, and in 2022 debuted a major public art commission with the Studio Museum in Harlem and Public Art Fund at Lincoln Center’s new David Geffen Hall.

Satterwhite has collaborated with musicians including Solange Knowles (When I Get Home, 2019), The 1975 (Having No Head, 2020), and Perfume Genius (Ugly Season, 2022). His 6-channel video installation A Metta Prayer was recently presented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall (2023–24).