Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Jibade-Khalil Huffman | Leading Video Artists Offer Advice for How Best to Enjoy the Medium

It’s OK to Leave in the Middle (and to Be Confused). Don't be put off by the long runtimes, uncomfortable seating, or a lack of narrative. — Melissa Smith

Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s Videos Offers Us a Parallax View of Ourselves

As Jibade-Khalil Huffman points out, most stories make us, the audience, into spectators, which is already too often our role in life. Here, he offers us a chance to write the story ourselves, even to experience it as participants. That may be the ultimate parallax: to watch a story we are telling ourselves at the same time, like a dream. —Geoff Wichert

Complicating Meaning: Jibade-Khalil Huffman Interviewed by Elisa Linn

"Thinking about interiority first and then drawing out this inner turmoil is basically always my starting place. I guess it’s a literary impulse or not even an impulse; it’s simply how I can’t help but frame things. Poetry allows you to not have to exhibit counterarguments but rather stage a different encounter altogether—one that may not or probably doesn’t offer the kind of answers or attempts at answers that nonfiction does." —Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Jibade-Khalil Huffman: ‘You Are Here’

Jibade-Khalil Huffman is the ultimate collector of imagery, layering images familiar and unknown to build new meaning. In this process, he sows fertile ground for the viewer to continue this construction, forming connections between recognizable images and the labyrinth of our own experiences. —Katie Hirsch

Halsey Exhibitions Explore Different Points of View

“Huffman pulls us in, if just for a moment, to focus on the here and now. His work compels you to stay, to watch, to listen, to reflect on the space around you and your own roles within it.” —Katie Hirsch

ARTIST TALK | Jibade-Khalil Huffman: You Are Here

"It's been a struggle at times to make certain exhibitions because as someone who makes both objects, like light boxes  & photographs, and video, I'm grappling with a budget. Typically with institutions I can do a bit of both. I viewed this [Halsey exhibition] as an opportunity to do basically a feature-length project." —Jibade-Khalil Huffman

JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN EXAMINES BLACKNESS IN RELATION TO POP CULTURE AND MEDIA WITH HIS LATEST EXHIBITION

The juxtaposition highlights the differences between content made for someone and made by someone. Additionally, Huffman has keen perspectives of his world as a Black man in America, highlighted with an impulsive nature to remix his observations and challenge the underlying tension between race and visibility in an image-saturated landscape. His work rings true to the digital world’s density and intensity of information, including love, no matter how well you can dance… —Durane West

Poetry, Pixels, and Posthumanism: Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s “Now That I Can Dance” at Tufts University Art Galleries

Rooted in his lifelong poetry practice, Huffman’s oeuvre interrogates the nebulous space between what we see on hyper-mediated platforms and how engaging with those platforms begins to shape us. —Maya Rubio

Not Just “Another Mural” | The fearless work of Jibade-Khalil Huffman ’05 MFA

Huffman’s work defies categorization. He constantly collects material—video clips, images from magazines, text—for his work. When pressed, he will say that his fundamental interest is “as an African American, how we see ourselves and how we’re seen or depicted in the media.” A published poet, he is interested in “forms of text that already exist and undermining or exploding them via poetry.” —James Bernard

The Artists’ Artists | Jibade-Khalil Huffman

—Artforum

Jibade-Khalil Huffman Thinks a Picture Speaks a Thousand Words

Writing is fully inextricable from contemporary art and part of Huffman’s brilliance lies in collating drifts of digital media and blasting through their banality with targeted shots from his own literature. —Paige K. Bradley

These Are the Essential Artists You Need to Watch

As with much of Huffman’s work, the piece draws on the intersection of writing, poetry, found media and everyday speech; as well as using a diverse array of subject matter including TV guides, abstracted maps, television stills, diagrams, staircases, annotations, cartoons, advertisements and more. —Emily Gosling

Big DAATA

Huffman uses the video console as a poignant and powerful mixing board, slowing down audio clips, replaying auto accidents in reverse, and putting it all to a curated soundtrack whose range is wider than our brief attention spans, from Stevie Wonder to Autechre to the comedy of Dave Chapelle. —Colin Lang

Gallery Watch: Total Running Time by Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Huffman’s work confronts serious subject matter while colliding loose and dated graphics together such as paint-by-number motifs, classic television stills, advertisements from the 1960s and iconography from various American comic books. His work embraces contemporary interests such as the degradation of digital media while also saluting recognizable imagery to draw his viewers in. —Clare Gemima

The FotoFest Biennial in Houston Returns with Riveting 2022 Edition

Huffman’s turbulent multi-screen film installation with images of pop culture, poetry, and media shows us some of our own nonstop intake, the fractured primary sources of where we derive—and doubt— many of our feelings. —Jennifer Piejko

MOCA Tucson displays ‘Action Painting’ for community to view outdoors

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson isn't letting visitors in right now, but you can see the latest piece of artwork without having to step inside. It's called 'Action Painting' and is a multi-layer collage that takes up the front window of the downtown museum. The artist, Jibade-Khalil Huffman uses vinyl, audio and video to show layers of themes like of violence, racism, police brutality and protest. —ABC Tuscon News

Jibade-Khalil Huffman taps into racial injustice, powerful imagery for MOCA Tucson exhibit

“What’s really interesting is that people who are biking by, or driving by will slow down and get out of their car sometimes, or get off their bike and come up to the installations and listen and look at it. It is probably getting a lot more traffic just by virtue of being on the street and being accessible at all hours and to everyone. And it’s free.” —Laura Copelin

That Feeling When: Jibade-Khalil Huffman

This material entrapment recalls Huffman’s Sculpture for Morgan Parker (2018), in which the text “A Tattoo of Harriet Tubman’s Face With a Tattoo of Your Face on Harriet Tubman’s Face on Your Face” is cut out, split up, and layered within two digitally collaged transparencies in a light box, the recursive text made almost illegible. While legibility is valuable currency in the art world—particularly for artists of color—Huffman refuses to hide the obstructions, the constraints, and the frame. He offers abundant language to demonstrate our capacity to extract meaning and deflect codification within it all. —Lumi Tan

Jibade-Khalil Huffman

The common threads through Huffman’s work are unflinching sincerity, vulnerability and a slight sense of cynical humor. The prints and videos read like visual poetry of someone’s diary—messy and complicated, abstract yet cohesive. —Leanna Robinson

Frieze Projects in Pictures

Images from the curated program on the backlot of Paramount Pictures during Frieze Los Angeles 2020.

The Return of L.A.’s Frieze Art Fair to the Paramount Lot: “It’s Like Being in Miami”

Elsewhere on the lot is Huffman’s billboard, May Day, honoring Grace Jones in the role of May Day, the villainous enforcer in the 1985 James Bond film, A View to a Kill. Hoisting a white man overhead, she is emblematic of a powerful black woman canceling a symbol of the patriarchy. —Degen Pener

Flaunt and Anat Ebgi Gallery Celebrate Jibade-Khalil Huffmna’s Solo Exhibition Opening at West Hollywood’s Pacifique

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is fantastic, and fantastic shows warrant fantastic afterthoughts, so we necked it to the charming art-deco Pacifique in West Hollywood for some fashionable nibbles, flaming mezcal concoctions, and a bevy of additional consumptive delights. —Flaunt 

Jibade-Khalil Huffman | If Identity’s Kaleidoscopic, Lets Loop It

With Huffman’s winning formula of pigment, sound, and vision, there is still so much apparent hope. —Marcel Alcala

Visiting artist Jibade-Khalil Huffman inspires students with mixed media

In terms of what non-art professionals can gain from Huffman’s work, according to Snyder, Huffman is not simply critiquing boundaries in the art field but the boundaries everyone encounters every day. —Lily Kepner

The Way You Make Me Feel: Jibade-Khalil Huffman

The cultural detritus collected in First Person Shooter creates an all-encompassing morass that’s reflected in other interior kaleidoscopic works by Huffman in this show. Huffman expresses how culture works as a trap, a panopticon that spirals like the Borges idea of the library of Babel — its speakers blaring the propaganda of control. But there are flickers and stills in this jet stream—like the image of Grace Jones —that can become almost a religious icon to fix on, to keep the faith. —Neil Fauerso

Collaged Text Gives Human for Scale Life

Huffman was able to incorporate FCC’s students into his video works as actors. Students are observed in scenes that jump from one perspective to the next quickly, with a soundtrack sampled in part from the 1977 movie “A Piece of the Action” starring Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, James Earl Jones, and Sheryl Lee Ralph. —Tamika Rey

15 Los Angeles Artists to Watch

Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s twitchy videos rely on a range of appropriated source material, from DVDs of movies like The Breakfast Club to stock photography to clips culled from the website WorldstarHipHop. —Maximilíano Durón

Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions, and the Social Environment Gallery Guide

Working now with installation, video, and photography, as well as language, Huffman does not put forth narratives. Rather, he continues to communicate through strings of idioms, stanzas of unfinished phrases, and nested layers of images. These segments, arranged by the artist, serve to interrupt, complicate, obscure, or complete one another. —Wexner Center for The Arts

What to See in Art Galleries This Week

“Tempo” gently and somewhat abstractly points out the struggle and oppression that have driven and accompanied black music, comedy and performance, even prompting them to flourish, but at a heavy cost. —Martha Schwendener

REVIEW | Beyond Language: Jibade-Khalil Huffman at Crisp-Ellert Art Museum

Methodology and inspiration aside, when pressed to describe his work to the uninitiated, Huffman is succinct: “I would describe it as working to achieve the kind of freedom not to have to answer this question — it’s about doing the opposite of boiling things down to one sentence. It’s about how life is complicated.” —Daniela A. Brown

Contemporary artist brings multimedia artwork to Crisp-Ellert Art Museum

"There’s this research process of going on YouTube and diving into different subjects — these Internet deep dives. Basically, it [the medium] just intuitively presents itself, but it starts from this initial openness and understanding of my own limitations." —Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Artists to Watch: Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Across genres, Huffman plucks moments in which nostalgia and humor (a recent light box work reads “White People Explain John Baldessari to Me”) comingle with anxiety and violence. —Annie Godfrey Larmon

Political art prominent in Miami

New works by Detroit-born Jibade-Khalil Huffman at Anat Ebgi gallery in Positions (and in Art Basel’s Film sector) are less politically strident but emphatically reference black culture, including music, film and literature. —Melanie Gerlis

Race relations in the spotlight at Art Basel in Miami Beach

The Los Angeles-based dealer is showing new works by Jibade-Khalil Huffman that focus on the black male figure in art history and US popular culture, including the video mashup Figuration B (2017). —Anny Shaw

Jibade-Khalil Huffman, FIGURATION @Downstairs Projects

An exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based poet and artist Jibade-Khalil Huffman now on view at Downstairs is a felicitous pairing of art and place. In two videos, a photo piece, and a limited-edition zine, words, images, and space work together in ways both disarming and disturbing. Some histories and narratives can only be told through improvisation and assemblage, and Huffman employs both, brilliantly and across all mediums, in the improvised surroundings of Stiler and Gordon’s project room. —Anne Doran

Now More Than Always

Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s video artwork, Duets includes a clip of Miles Davis from a 1988 interview on 60 Minutes where Davis says he would play if no one listened because he loves music. When people are listening, and buying, the art becomes a dialog even if the artist speaks no words. But sometimes they are not having the same conversation. —Kealy Boyd

Critic’s Pick: Jibade-Khalil Huffman

For all the accessible humor, pop imagery, and antiracist politics of Huffman’s work, its poetic excess of aesthetic, cultural, and semantic input accumulates into an opaque mass, overwhelming expedient readings. —Chloe Wyma

Don’t Mourn, Organize!…Interview with Jibade-Khalil Huffman

"I’m maybe too impatient for the art world anyway. For me, corny as it may sound, it’s about working through the best way to deal with ideas and more importantly, where and how these ideas are received by a public. As such, changing the form to better suit an idea is more important than figuring into the history of a particular medium or some other nonsense. As ever, I care more about the idea." —Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Kush is My Cologne

In his [Huffman's] demarcation of space through textual, visual and cultural cues, he uses the gallery as a space where the viewer becomes equally invested as spectator and subject.

JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN: IN CONVERSATION WITH NICOLE KAACK

Poet and artist, videographer and sculptor, Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s works defy the limitations of traditional media boundaries, bringing a poetic sensibility to visual manipulations. Huffman’s sculptural installations of video, found objects, and prints explore the particularities and possibilities of form, refuting the structures that foreclose on our ability to understand ourselves and each other. —Nicole Kaack

Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s STANZA

Instead of head-on rage, as encountered in so much current art referring to Black Lives Matter and parallel movements for transformative justice, Huffman's rage appears diffuse and peripheral, felt at the edges of a shifting consciousness. —Thom Donovan

PERFORMANCE | JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN: (LIKE) KWAME

Prefacing the work is a new short video based around two found interviews with the actress Cicely Tyson. The video, along with intermittent sound elements, connect with and perversely work to further de-stabilize the authority of the speaker. —Swiss Institute

What to See in New York Galleries This Week: Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Bodies are ghostly in a multimedia installation by Jibade-Khalil Huffman. They’re seen in occasional figures flickering in a video, and implied in a sculpture made of car windows that seem to have been shattered at points of impact, and in the overlapping, self-canceling words “your neighbor” in a silk-screen painting. —Karen Rosenberg

Meet Harlem’s Newest Artists-in-Residence

In Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s multimedia installation, the artist and poet's experiential use of language depicts the complexity of black thought and rage. The screenprint, Call and Response, collapses an oratory device used in the black church and an old preacher phrase—“Turn to your neighborhood and say neighbor!”—used for affirmation and renders them illegible. —Antwaun Sargent

Critic’s Guide: Los Angeles

Created during a residency at LACE, Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s group of static and moving images continue the artist and poet’s practice of visualizing verbal riddles and doublespeak. —Jennifer Piejko

9 Emerging Artists You Need to Know About Right Now

Jibade-Khalil Huffman uses his background in poetry to inform his research in the mediums of performance, photography, and video. —Caroline Elbaor

Jibade-Khalil Huffman on his exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and LACE

"This work is meant to be dark. There’s a lot of rage. I’m interested in therapy versus religion in the African American community and wanting to deal with that as a subject along with existential rage, anger, and depression—things that still aren’t really talked about in the black community." —Jibade-Khalil Huffman

First Look: Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Huffman explores how the politics and emotions embedded within particular types of speech and imagery haunt personal identity. He creates a shell game that briefly uncouples language from subjectivity, and reminds us of the game’s darkly comic intrigue. —Sam Korman

Staff Picks: Coates, Cartels, Caesar, Cigarettes

Huffman’s guiding principle is elision: his sentences and subjects elide quietly into each other and into the ether, the white of the page exerting a nearly physical force on the language that passes through it. The forms in his collage are miraculously edgeless; as an artist he seems more interested in conflation and ambience than contrast. —Oliver Preston

Mateo Tannatt Photographs Jibade-Khalil Huffman

—Contemporary Art Review LA

Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Using history or certain traditions as a ground from which to deviate, Huffman brings seemingly disparate subjects and objects into association without submitting to the ever-present temptation of over-determining their relationships. His work exists in an instant then disappears, which tend to be paradoxically mysterious, oddly familiar and yet completely unknown. —Dea K

Material Obsession at Untitled.

We fell for Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s series of prints at Samuel Freeman. The artist took old photos from his grandmother’s cookbook, splicing them repeatedly so that the images looked like hiccups from a printer on the fritz, or a jpeg that hasn’t downloaded correctly. The cakes, canapés, and champagne can still be made out, but Huffman’s coy post-editing brings these works to a level of abstraction. —Katie Donoghue

The Ephemeral Texts of Jibade-Khalil Huffman

"I've been deliberately, not arbitrarily making these pieces about memory flights, there is a real passing to that, but this work is really more about telling stories, but in a way that's more about investigating the foreground." —Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Explosive Fragments: Poems and Photographs

One of the busiest dudes around, he is a poet and photographer (in which order I know not) who, in recent years, has been staging performances. Two 35mm slide projectors, one loaded with words, stands next to a carousel meticulously edited with beautifully scene images complimented usually, by live music. Like his work, Khalil is often elusive, piqung interest before quickly ducking back into the shadows, slide projector or subway station. —Rebecca Leopold

Q & A American Poetry: Jibade-Khalil Huffman

"I think of myself first as an American, then as an African-American who makes art. I make work that wouldn't necessarily be classified as African-American art and yet still find race inescapable as supposed subject matter and talking point in discussions on art." —Jibade-Khalil Huffman

Review: 19 Names for Our Band

Huffman's poems resist traditional narrative meaning, relying instead on the power of nuance, juxtaposition, and suggestion. Here ambiguity salts every poem, inviting reading and re-reading... For Huffman, winner of the Grolier Poetry Prize, none of these poems are ostensibly autobiographical. —Camille Yvette Welsch

Poet’s Sampler | Jibade-Khalil Huffman

We note Huffman's deft handling of the primetime phrase ("guest appearance"), the canned vernacular ("it never troubles me none"), and the lingua Neiman Marcus ("purchase seems pretentious, unlike "buy"). While a single, fixed meaning in these poems may elude our grasp, they are charged with significance, and their suave style makes them satisfying and complete. —Caroline Knox