“(King’s music) has elements of a guiding spiritual that floats in the air to give congregants the strength and, yes, the spirit to move forward.”
Bio
Leah King is an artist, musician, and educator based in Los Angeles. She creates audio installations and interactive visual art works that explore race, gender, power, and queerness through an afrofuturist lens. By incorporating archival family photos and first-hand interviews, her layered collages and soundscapes feature historical images, religious texts, layered vocal harmonies, and candid observations, to create new methods of storytelling. Her visual practice uses almost exclusively found materials including hand-cut paper, glitter, diamond dust, fabric, sequins, rhinestones, and lace, while her audio work is inspired by house music, experimental jazz, and gospel, creating a uniquely immersive world that acknowledges and complicates her multiethnic and multifaith background.
Artist Statement
Leah King’s sonic and visual art projects are specifically focused on the exploration of futurity as an access point for intergenerational healing - in the words of Robin D.G. Kelley, “Without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down” (Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 2002). By mining the imagination both in the realm of what we believe our histories to be and what we believe they can become, the work operates in the temporal space where storytelling is both history and possibility. Drawing from aesthetics of afro-futurism, club culture, Jewish humor, and science fiction, her work combines sociocultural healing with queer musicology, Black and Judeo historiography, and diasporic studies.
Her current practice is highly interactive, and involves a deeper look at how play is intrinsic to sociocultural revolution by designing multisensory projects that incorporate sight, sound, smell, taste, touch into the museum experience as a practice in both decoloniality and Black futurity. Upcoming works include sound mapping, 3-D large-scale immersive pieces, and interactive live art.
King has been a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Political Power Fellow (San Francisco), Converse Rubber Tracks Artist Resident (Berlin), and was the inaugural artist-in-residence at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum. Her work has been supported by Brooklyn Arts Council, Berlin Music Board, Museum of the African Diaspora, Center for Cultural Innovation, Headlands Center for the Arts, and has been shown in venues throughout the globe including Le Divan du Monde (Paris), Chapeau Rouge (Prague), and Nuyorican Poets Cafe (Manhattan). She has worked with musician Mykki Blanco and artist Shantell Martin, and performed onstage with Margaret Cho, Marc Jacobs, V (formerly Eve Ensler), and Big Freedia. Institutional lectures and presentations include San Francisco State University, New York University, and Mills College (Oakland).