Nandi Jordan

I am a multidisciplinary visual artist interested in exposing the complexities and contradictions of my everyday Black life. Trained as a sociologist and self-taught as an artist, my art weaves the personal with the cultural and historical, creating thought-provoking juxtapositions of image and text. I found my way to art while finishing my doctorate in sociology: cutting and repurposing seminal texts alongside family photographs as a way of finding my own visual language.

My art uses mixed media collage, book pages, photography and printmaking techniques to create motifs around themes of family, community and connectedness. I use repetition and gestures to communicate the unspoken and obscured while grappling with my existence and lineage as a Black woman. My work is both self-portraiture and social critique; I aim to put viewers in the middle of the familiar joy and discomfort that define how Blackness is both seen and experienced in society.