The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Opens the Door to Jacolby Satterwhite’s World

A new exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis will take you on a journey through the radical worlds of a visionary artist.

As an innovator in the fields of 3D-animation and performance art, Jacolby Satterwhite explores the boundaries between human and digital experiences. Tracing more than 10 years of the artist’s creative output, Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth will feature a series of densely layered multimedia works, including 3D-animated films, animated neon, a record store installation, an immersive virtual reality space, sculptures, paintings and wallpaper, to create imaginative environments.

Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth – the first major survey of his works – will be on view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis from March 10 through Aug. 13.

“I’ve been following Satterwhite’s career since the beginning,” associate curator Misa Jeffereis says, “and I’ve always been impressed by his work. It’s dynamic, it’s fun, and I think audiences will be drawn to it.

“CAM is a launchpad for today’s artists,” she continues. “We support innovative artists, and Satterwhite certainly fits into that category. He delves into so many mediums, pushing the genres of art and the ideas of contemporary society.”

The Contemporary Art Museum collaborated with the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University to bring the large-scale exhibition to St. Louis. “It’s been an amazing experience to see the show come to life here,” Jeffereis says. “We’re turning over all the downstairs galleries as well as the 60-foot Project Wall to fully immerse visitors in the exhibition. There will also be an outdoor video projection playing from dusk until midnight every day.”

Adding to the charged atmosphere of the exhibition, Satterwhite will present some of his recent paintings, which will distinguish the Contemporary Art Museum’s show from The Miller’s.

“The film-making process and the CGI-animation process are taxing and laborious,” Satterwhite explains, “but during the COVID-19 pandemic, I found the time and space to finish 20-something paintings, which are meditations on the ideas that I produce in my videos and sculptures. Painting helps me understand color and space, and it allows me to focus solely on the image so that I can harness the true power of the concepts that I’m delivering in a much more kinetic way through edgy animated videos. It all relates.”

Satterwhite draws on a broad set of personal and cultural influences, including mythology, modernism, video gaming, vogueing, Black culture and queer theory. Many of his pieces also reference his home and family life, especially his late mother, Patricia Satterwhite, who was a prolific artist, musician and writer in her own right.

“Some of the mediums that I use come from my personal histories – memorabilia, family photos, my mother’s drawings and sound recordings,” Satterwhite says. “I digitize these tactile objects and use them as the architecture for my animated worlds. It’s sort of a posthumous collaboration between my mother and myself.

“When she was alive, my mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia,” he continues, “and she made 2,000 drawings of schematic diagrams of common objects, which eventually became a cathartic process for her and a way to maintain order with her mental illness. When I got older, I started to use her drawings and sound records in a 3D-animation software to build massive worlds. [My art] isn’t about her exclusively, but along with outsourced data and sound objects, she helps me build a coded, mythological sphere that examines the contemporary zeitgeist as well as personal narratives. It’s an open-ended process, and [Spirits Roaming on the Earth] explores my complex, conceptual practice. The exhibition is visual poetry, and I welcome people to come to the show and find elements and themes that speak to them.”

Building on a foundation of resilience, reinvention and celebration, Satterwhite’s surreal worlds have become a new frontier for self-expression. “In the exhibition, visitors will become enmeshed in the works,” Jeffereis says. “They have a maximalist aesthetic, but as you spend time with them, they become vulnerable, as well.”

Avatars of Satterwhite and his friends populate the real and imagined spaces, revealing how one can work through trauma and heal by making art, dance and music.

“The baseline of my work is personal, but it also talks about social issues, environmental issues, philosophy and more,” Satterwhite says. “It doesn’t address the past; it’s about today – and tomorrow.”

Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis will give audience’s a front-row seat to the future of the art world. If you want to hear directly from the artist, stop by the opening on March 10, when Satterwhite will be in town.