Mendi + Keith Obadike make music, art and literature. Their works include The Sour Thunder, an Internet opera (Bridge Records), Crosstalk: American Speech Music (Bridge Records), Black.Net.Art Actions, a suite of new media artworks (published in re:skin on M.I.T Press), Big House / Disclosure, a 200 hour public sound installation (Northwestern University), Phonotype, a book & CD of media artworks, and a poetry collection, Armor and Flesh (Lotus Press). They have contributed sounds/music to projects by a wide range of artists, including loops for soul singer D'Angelo's first album and a score for playwright Anna Deavere Smith at the Lincoln Center Institute. They were invited to develop their first "opera-masquerade" by writer Toni Morrison at her Princeton Atelier. Their other honors include a Rockefeller New Media Arts Fellowship, Pick Laudati Award for Digital Art, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Vectors Fellowship from USC. Their intermedia work has been commissioned by The NY African Film Festival and Electronic Arts Intermix, The Yale Cabaret, Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), and The Whitney Museum of Art, among other institutions. Their music has been featured on New York and Chicago public radio, as well as on Juniradio (104.5) in Berlin.
Keith received a BA in Art from North Carolina Central University and an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University. He is an associate professor in the College of Arts and Communication at William Paterson University and serves as an art advisor for the Times Square Alliance. Mendi received a BA in English from Spelman College and a PhD in Literature from Duke University. After working as a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University, she became a poetry editor at Fence Magazine and an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. Mendi + Keith are currently developing a sound installation series African Metropole / Sonic City, an intermedia suite entitled American Cypher, and a new series of performance works including Four Electric Ghosts, an opera-masquerade (mmanwu) commissioned by the Kitchen (NYC), and TaRonda Who Wore White Gloves (agbogho mmwo).
Programming
