TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN
TNM_ [CLUB - 2018]
2021
Polished leather boots on metal stand
21 1/4 by 16 by 16 in. 54 by 40.6 by 40.6 cm.
TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN
A.B. 4_88B
2021
Leather lineman harness, steel, leather dye, Saphir shoe polish and spit
21 1/2 by 53 by 2 1/2 in. 54.6 by 134.6 by 6.3 cm.
TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN
I Prayed to the Wrong God for You (still)
2019
Mixed media installation, with six-channel color HD video, six hand-carved tools, four metal tools, a helmet, and wooden box in vitrine
Dimensions variable
TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN
Shug Avery's Kiss (still)
2018
Neon mounted on acrylic, ed. of 3 plus 1 AP
11 by 26 1/4 by 1 1/2 in. 27.9 by 66.7 by 3.8 cm.
TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN
Mirror #1 “Take me from behind…” BLINDER #1
2017
Used urinal flush valves, copper pipes, steel, wood, black paint and Bondage tape
Mirror: 13 3/4 by 11 1/2 by 5 1/2 in. 34.9 by 29.2 by 14 cm.
Blinder: 53 by 5 1/2 by 24 1/2 in. 134.6 by 14 by 62.2 cm.
Installation dimensions variable; approximately:
53 by 25 by 24 1/2 in. 134.6 by 63.5 by 62.2 cm.
TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN
Mirror #2 “Look up…” BLINDER #2
2017
Used urinal flush valves, copper pipes, steel, wood, black paint and Bondage tape
Mirror: 13 1/2 by 11 by 5 3/8 in. 34.3 by 27.9 by 13.7 cm.
Blinder: 41 1/8 by 5 1/2 by 18 1/2 in. 104.5 by 14 by 47 cm.
Installation dimensions variable; approximately:
42 1/8 by 25 by 18 1/2 in. 107 by 63.5 by 47 cm.
TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN
The Structure of My Desire (still)
2017
VHS black and white video transferred to SD
TRT: 13:21 min
TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN
The Hitter (still)
2017
1 HD color video/ 1 SD video with sound
TRT: 4:49
TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN
Se te subió el santo? (Are you in a trance?)
2016
10 digital c-prints
Image size: 14 by 11 in. 35.6 by 27.9 cm. (each)
Sheet size: 16 by 13 in. 40.6 by 33 cm. (each)
Edition of 3 plus 2 artist's proofs (#1/3)
TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN
Lost + Found I (000 Steel Ring)
2015-2018
Steel chain, stainless steel ring and bull pulley, ed. of 3 plus 1 AP
Install dimensions (variable): 50 by 9 by 2 in. 127 by 22.9 by 5.1 cm
TIONA NEKKIA McCLODDEN
THE CHILLS (still)
2014
3 channel audio and found church pew
Dimensions variable
TRT: 96:29
Tiona Nekkia McClodden at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Art Basel Miami Beach, 2021.
b. 1981, Blytheville, AR
Lives and works in Philadelphia, PA
Tiona Nekkia McClodden is 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.”
McClodden spent her formative years in the American South. In Georgia, after withdrawing from Clark Atlanta University, she ventured into filmmaking, working largely within the punk and club scene before moving to North Philadelphia in 2006. 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 the Museum of Modern Art. 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.
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. Work by McClodden is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Rennie Museum, Vancouver.
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, in Artforum, Cultured Magazine, ART 21 Magazine, and many other publications.
All images © Tiona Nekkia McClodden.
The Whitney Museum in New York has awarded its Bucksbaum Award, a prize for an artist participating in the Whitney Biennial, to Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Through the award, the Philadelphia-based artist will take home $100,000.
“McClodden’s work is bold and original and her contribution to the Whitney Biennial is extraordinarily rich with cultural, historical, and spiritual resonances,” Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, said in a statement.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash is presenting the group exhibition “Olvido, Sombra, Nada” (“Oblivion, Shadow, Nothing”), featuring work by the artists Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Lucas Samaras, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Open from February 3 until March 5, the show follows the tension in portraiture between acts of revelation and concealment, named for the poem Espejo (“Mirror”) by Octavio Paz, which looks at understanding and misunderstanding in relation to self-reflections. From Samaras, ten works from the artist’s Sitting series (1978—1980) reveal the artist himself photographed into the shadows of his portraits. Sepuya’s featured works use methods of exposure and props like black drop cloths, translucent screens, and smudged mirrors when capturing indirect or partial portraits of human figures. And from McClodden, viewers will find a suite of black polished leather objects and a series of 65 prints seen for the first time, which come together to create a self-portrait of the artist that at once reveals and challenges elements of identity.
The New York–based gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash now represents Tiona Nekkia McClodden, a closely watched artist whose work recently appeared at the Prospect New Orleans triennial. The gallery presented work by the artist in its booth at Art Basel Miami Beach last month. Mitchell-Innes & Nash will include McClodden’s work in a group show at a seasonal space in Mexico City next month, with a solo show to follow in New York in 2023.
For a presentation as part of Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s booth, Tiona Nekkia McClodden presents several new works that build off her 2016 work Se te subió el santo? (Are you in a trance?), which served as a “disclosure” of parts of her identity that she had previously kept private. “This is me—the first way I see myself,” she said. The other works on view stem from a series of photographs from related performances and film works as well as a recently completed leather lineman harness, titled A.B. 4 88B.
Centered in the gallery rests a motorcycle, a relic of someone whose absence has been palpable since she left the realm of the living in 2019. Barbara Hammer is the subject of a museum-quality show, albeit in a gallery, curated by Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Marking the opening of Company’s new space on Elizabeth Street, this exhibition is steeped in rigorous research and careful preparation on par with any large institutional endeavor. Acutely aware that she herself would no longer be here to witness it, Hammer chose McClodden, without the latter’s knowledge, as a possible curator for this show. Viewing exhibition-making as an art practice in its own right, McClodden has long been invested in research-based projects that use installation as a kind of portraiture. Primarily focusing on Black queer genealogies, the artist is known (among many other things) for her curatorial interventions focusing on the poet Essex Hemphill (Affixing Ceremony: Four Movements for Essex, 2015) and the composer Julius Eastman (Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental, 2017).
For the inaugural show at its new space, Company Gallery has mounted the first solo show in New York dedicated to the feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer since her death in 2019. Titled “Tell me there is a lesbian forever…”, the show is curated by artist and filmmaker Tiona Nekkia McClodden, who delved deep into Hammer’s archive to gather videos, photos, and drawings from the first few decades of her practice starting in the late 1960s, when she came out as a lesbian, rode off on a motorcycle with a Super-8 camera, and started creating her experimental films, such as Dyketactics in 1974.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden is both an artist and a Santería priestess. Also known as La Regla Lucumí, this Afro-Caribbean religion is, like Haitian Vodou, an amalgamation of Roman Catholicism and Ifa, the religion of the Yoruba people in West Africa. McClodden is American, and much of her work centers around being dispossessed of, and later reclaiming, her religious heritage.
Since learning how to make films in a basement at Spelman College (where she was not enrolled), Tiona Nekkia McClodden has found her way from the editing room to the studio, making work that has garnered her both a Guggenheim grant and a place in the 2019 Whitney Biennial—for which she won the exhibition’s top honor, the Bucksbaum Award. As McClodden’s practice has expanded into sculpture, installation, and performance, her background in film and the medium’s attendant concerns with time and narrative have remained central to the work she makes, while allowing her to examine content as diverse as BDSM, Santeria, Autism, the erasure of Black queer artists from the canon of art history, and the multiple potentials of readymades.
You are hit first by the contrast. The clinical white of the gallery walls behind the black leather and paint draw in and repel—equal and opposite forces. Within the freeing constraints of the gallery space, we are invited to explore an artistic vision of other types of freeing constraint: physical and psychological kinds, based off leather and trust and, most importantly, balance in pain and pleasure.
In June, as part of Pride Month, ARTnews hosted a panel titled “Picturing Herstory: Queer Artists on Lesbian Visibility,” in partnership with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, at Spring Place in New York. For the panel, ARTnews convened artists Joan E. Biren (JEB), Lola Flash, and Tiona Nekkia McClodden to discuss how they began making art, why it’s important to center people who have historically been excluded from the mainstream, and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.