Nayland Blake: Mess for Success — Examples From My Confusing Career
Sculptor Nayland Blake reflects on three decades of boundary-crossing work spanning sculpture, performance, and identity politics.
Why we picked this
Blake's work resists the tidy career arc that most artist talks present — this is an honest reckoning with how a practice actually evolves when you refuse to stay in one lane.
Nayland Blake has spent three decades making work that refuses categorization — sculpture, performance, drawing, video, and installation, often centered on desire, identity, and the body. This talk at the New York Studio School takes the unusual approach of leaning into the confusion rather than smoothing it over.
Blake’s career spans from the queer art activism of the late 1980s through teaching at Columbia and ICP, with work in the collections of major museums. What makes this particular talk worth attending is Blake’s willingness to discuss the detours, contradictions, and productive failures that shaped the trajectory — the kind of candor most artist talks carefully avoid.
Free and open to the public.