American Artist

Excited to join the XXL Freshman class of 2026! jk I’m a Guggenheim Fellow! I’ll be working on my project CRT Archive and bringing it to life. Thank you for believing in me and this project.💫😌 #guggfellows2026 @guggfellows

Watch me on PBS 📺 This is a clip from “Art & Science Collide,” covering a few projects across @gettymuseum ‘s @pstinla last year. I had the pleasure of taking the PBS film crew out to the Mojave desert when @yeschester and I were doing some scouting for our film shoot. You can also see some of the guys from Reaction Research Society that worked with me on this incredible project. Such an honor to have this moment documented. You can watch the full film at the link in my bio.

Live streaming, cultural appropriation and the sometimes-absurd logic of de-platforming culture unravel in American Artist's first UK commission, CRASH OUT. Developed whilst in residence at Somerset House Studios in 2025, CRASH OUT and its exploration of the culture of streaming communities continues @a_____rtist 's ongoing engagement with popular forms of dissemination such as tv news, advertising and social media, and the ways these platforms shape identity, visibility, and power. Watch it now on Channel - our online space for art, ideas and the artistic process.

Los Angeles | It’s the last week to see American Artist’s exhibition at the gallery. We’re open Thursday–Saturday, 10 am–5 pm! The exhibition closes May 16! The wicked humor of American Artist’s assemblages echoes that of Hammons, who also rebukes the various workings of capture. Both artists find brilliance in ordinary solutions to spatial and architectural constraint, especially when forged by people confined to the intersection of “poverty” and “capture,” as Power Grid relays. Society may recognize the subtle stacking and baling of flattened cardboard boxes as a scourge rather than an invention, but Occupied pays homage to this necessary ingenuity. Like Hammons, American Artist emphasizes slight gestures of self-preservation that have traditionally had no legitimacy as forms of social life, but re-emerge as new forms of agency. —Abbe Schriber (full text available online) 📷 Paul Salveson

Crisis Collector (Louise) Tempered Artforum magazines, food rations, emergency drinking water, new American standard bible, ibuprofen, flashlight, fire striker, whistle, fishing knife, emergency blanket. 5 x 10.5 x 10.5 in. “And yet, financial catastrophe is not the only impending form of present and future dystopia. Crisis Collector (Louise) comprises a stack of glossy Artforum magazines, decommissioned from the purpose of critical thought and repurposed as a leftist doomsday prepper’s hidden go-bag.” - @abbecschriber On view at @commonwealthandcouncil through May 16, 2026.

Elite Capture, 2026 Autographed Kamala Harris photograph, Combahee River Collective Statement book, artist’s frame 12.5 x 16.5 x 2.5 in “Elite Capture allegorizes the trap of representation when mobilized toward an agenda that continues to underdevelop communities marginalized by class, race, ethnicity, gender, and/or sexuality, among other factors. Peering out from behind a signed, framed photograph of one-time Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is the recognizable red cover of The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977), containing the first written documentation of the phrase “identity politics.” Here identity politics’ radical feminist woman-of-color origins are immobilized by the false promises of the first Black and Asian woman president, whose ascendency ignited debates about structures of classism and racism that continue to be replicated in positions of power.” - @abbecschriber On view at @commonwealthandcouncil through May 16, 2026.

On April 14th, a huge announcement was made by the Guggenheim Fellowship of their 2026 recipients. Excitingly, I am proud to say that I know one of the artists who was named as a Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts: the Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist American Artist (yes, that’s their name!). In celebration of this most wonderful announcement, I thought I’d share a throwback to American Artist’s incredible solo exhibition last year at Pioneer Works, “Shaper of God”. This monumental show was the artist’s cross-disciplinary engagement with the late African-American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947 - 2006). Butler’s books often were set in a near-future, dystopian America mired in worsening climate change, wealth inequality, and political corruption. Like Butler, American is originally from Southern California, which is where most of her novels take place. I’ll never forget that when “Shaper of God” opened last January, the exhibition took on new significance with the concurrence of the tragic fires in Los Angeles. Suddenly, it felt as though Butler’s writings became prophecy fulfilled and that American was a kind of spiritual successor using their practice - which in this show, was mainly of site-specific installations, documentary performance, and archival research - to grapple with and respond to the visionary ideas expressed in her books. Congratulations to American for attaining this prestigious honor! #pioneerworks #guggenheimfellowship #americanartist #guggenheim #fellowship

Occupied, 2026 1939 New York World’s Fair bench, cardboard boxes, pillows, twine 34 1/2 x 96 x 27 1/2 inches In American Artist’s second exhibition with @commonwealthandcouncil , imagination willfully defies hostile environments. Comprising wall-based and sculptural media, this new body of work affirms the ingenuity of survival and the art of improvising in adverse circumstances regardless of class division and social advantage. - Abbe Schriber On view at through May 16, 2026.

Power Grid I, 2026 Spray paint on wall 28’ x 10’ Power Grid began as a thought experiment, to trace experiences of freedom and captivity as they occur across an extreme expanse of class difference. It is a grid suggesting incremental deviations along the various axes (Freedom through Captivity, and Poverty through Wealth). The chart represented is the work itself, and can take many forms at the discretion of the artist or institution, in the spirit of early conceptualists Sol Lewitt and Lawrence Weiner. On view at @commonwealthandcouncil through May 16, 2026

A solo exhibition by American Artist (@a_____rtist ) is on view at Commonwealth and Council (@commonwealthandcouncil ), Los Angeles — until 16 May 2026. American Artist’s second exhibition with Commonwealth and Council begins with a grid. Power Grid — a large-scale wall diagram, silvery and spraypainted — maps the electrical network as a metaphor for racial capitalism and resource extraction. Cool and diagrammatic in form, politically charged in content. The works that follow extend this logic. Flattened cardboard stacked as shelter, Artforum magazines repurposed as a doomsday go-bag, a framed photograph of Kamala Harris with a Combahee River Collective Statement tucked behind it. Each piece holds the tension between capture and ingenuity — asking where survival ends and agency begins. Discover a selection of works presented in the exhibition. 1. American Artist, Occupied, 2026 2. ⁠American Artist, Crisis Collector (Louise), 2026 3. American Artist, Power Grid I, 2026 4. American Artist, Elite Capture, 2026 ——— #Docent #DocentArt #AmericanArtist #CommonwealthAndCouncil #ContemporaryArt Images ©️ Courtesy of Paul Salveson, the artist and Commonwealth and Council.

Los Angeles | Our second exhibition with American Artist is on view through May 16! Gallery hours: Thursday–Saturday, 10 am–5 pm To be sure, how comfortably we endure political and economic breakdown depends on our relation to a spectrum of “freedom” and “capture”—or subjection to the mercy of the few who control social benefits intended for the broader denizenry. For African-descended people, captivity is further linked to the state of enslavement and legacies of slavery that continue to hold social mobility at bay. The large-scale wall diagram Power Grid investigates the variable outcomes of these relations. Both in its title and its silvery spraypainted gleam, the work cannily puns on the electrical grid as the invisible network that charges a world structured by racial capitalism and resource extraction. Not unlike the conceptual wall-based charts and murals of Sol Lewitt or Lawrence Weiner, Power Grid imposes a cool, logical approach to forces that often feel out of our control. At the same time, the grid, a mainstay of twentieth-century modernist abstraction, here becomes stretched and recharted into new formations, destabilizing the viewer’s perceptual experience beyond the wall. We negotiate our own placement and complicity amid the coordinates, conceived by the artist as variable, ever-changing, and subjective. In this sense, Power Grid lays bare the dynamics of racialization and reclamation that lurk behind the wall-based iconographic silhouettes of Kara Walker, or David Hammons’s wall “drawings” of textured Black hair. — Abbe Schriber The full text is available on our website 📸: Paul Salveson

My solo show in LA opens this Saturday @ 3-5PM. If I’ve ever made you smile in your life, stop by. “In American Artist’s second exhibition with @commonwealthandcouncil , imagination willfully defies hostile environments. Comprising wall-based and sculptural media, this new body of work affirms the ingenuity of survival and the art of improvising in adverse circumstances regardless of class division and social advantage. […] These artworks negotiate the shifting patterns of distribution, access, and resources as they crisscross aesthetic and political horizons. Is capture a state of ultimate dehumanization, or ultimate freedom? Where do these states of being end and begin, and who decides?” — @abbecschriber