Jibade-Khalil Huffman, The Way You Make Me Feel, 2018 Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX, Installation view
About
Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer whose video and photo works use found, archival material and contemporary ephemera to address slippage in memory and language, particular to race and visibility. Lyrical strophes of text and densely-composed imagery produce objects of perpetual flux, indexed by accumulating layers which challenge normative symbolic and semiotic hierarchies. Through projection and repetition, Huffman’s work evokes the untranslatable, ruminating on the liminal qualities of singular experiences through narrative and graphic rhythms.
Recent solo museum exhibitions include Brief Emotion, Frac Bretagne, Rennes, FR; You Are Here, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art Charleston, SC; and Now That I Can Dance, Tufts University Art Gallery, Tufts University, Medford, MA. Huffman’s work has also been exhibited at museums and institutions including Wexner Center for the Arts, Ballroom Marfa, The Kitchen, MoCA Tucson, Swiss Institute, New York, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, The Jewish Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Hammer Museum.
Huffman was educated at Bard College (BA), Brown University (MFA, Literary Arts), and USC (MFA, Studio Art), his awards include the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Jerome Foundation Travel Grant and fellowships from Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Lighthouse Works, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Huffman was a 2015-16 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work is in the permanent collections of Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Kadist, San Francisco, CA/Paris, FR; Pierce & Hill Harper Arts Foundation, Detroit, MI; Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem, NY; and Tufts University Art Collection, Medford, MA. Huffman lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Jibade-Khalil Huffman Sculpture for Morgan Parker (A Tattoo of Harriet Tubman's Face With a Tattoo of Your Face on Harriet Tubman's Face on Your Face), 2018
Transparency in lightbox 77.25 x 41.5 x 5.5 inches / 196.2 x 105.4 x 14 cm
Jibade-Khalil Huffman Sculpture for Morgan Parker (A Tattoo of Harriet Tubman's Face With a Tattoo of Your Face on Harriet Tubman's Face on Your Face), 2018
Transparency in lightbox 77.25 x 41.5 x 5.5 inches / 196.2 x 105.4 x 14 cm
Jibade-Khalil Huffman Picture for Paul Mooney (Everybody Wants/ Nobody Wants), 2018
C-print, framed
29 ½ x 44 ½ x 1 inches / 74.9 x 113 x 2.5 cm
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
Jibade-Khalil Huffman The Mirror, 2017
Transparecies, die cut plexi, flatscreen monitor, powder coated metal frame, looping video
51.5 x 31.75 x 5 inches / 130.8 x 80.6 x 12.7 cm
Jibade-Khalil Huffman White People Explain John Baldessari To Me, 2017
Transparency in powder coated metal lightbox
44 x 29.5 x 2.5 inches / 111.8 x 74.9 x 6.4 cm
Jibade-Khalil Huffman By The Author of Another Country & Nobody Knows My Name, 2017
Transparency, wood, plexiglass, fluorescent lights
35 x 31 x 6 1/8 inches / 88.9 x 78.7 x 15.6 cm
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 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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
"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
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
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
Smith, Melissa, “We Asked Leading Video Artists How Best to Enjoy the Medium—and, Yes, It’s OK to Leave in the Middle (and to Be Confused),” artnet, July 11, 2022 (Link)