Mendi & Keith Obadike

Utopias: Seeking For A City (2018-2019) was inspired by free African-American towns created from the early 1800s to the late 1960s in America. Mendi + Keith researched and visited a few of these historic towns across the U.S. making audio and video recordings. This material became the basis for an installation in an mid-19th century house in at Weeksville Heritage Center in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The installation featured Mendi + Keith's rendition of the Africa-American spiritual "I am Seeking for A City" playing through the walls, floors and ceiling of the house against a series of Mendi + Keith's framed hand-drawn maps of African-American towns and a video landscapes the towns.

Sonic Migration (2015–16) Part 1: Homes is a video and four-channel sound work. The video shows slow moving imagery of the internal architecture of Tindley Temple, a historic Black Philadelphia church against ambient recording of the structure and Mendi + Keith's remix of the Tindley composition "A Better Home."

Free/Phase (2014–15) has three components. Part 1: Beacon is a sound installation that played from the rooftop of the Chicago Cultural Center and Stony Island Arts Bank. The piece used a large parabolic speaker to project a narrow beam of sound like a spotlight into the streets of Chicago. It played phrases of freedom songs morning, noon and evening like a church bell or call to prayer. Part 2: Overcome is a video and four-channel sound work. This piece uses sounds from the Edmund Pettus Bridge (the site of 1965's Bloody Sunday) in Selma, Alabama to create a haunting version of the civil right anthem We Shall Overcome. Part 3: In Dialogue with DJs Mendi + Keith invited the public to sit with popular Chicago DJs and have a guided conversation and private listening session using a playlist of freedom songs.

This six-minute sound piece references the English foxtrot tradition (its title, references the term In the pink) and uses African thumb pianos. It became part of their 2009 album Crosstalk on Bridge Records and was featured on WNYC's New Sounds in 2010.

They contributed a chapter to the 2008 Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky. The same year they produced a compilation CD entitled Crosstalk: American Speech Music on Bridge Records. The album features music by Vijay Iyer, Guillermo E. Brown, Shelley Hirsch, George E. Lewis, Pamela Z, John Link, Paul Lansky, Tracie Morris, DJ Spooky, Daniel Bernard Roumain and Peter Gordon/Lawrence Weiner.

If the Heavens Don't Hear/The Earth Will Hear (2008) This two-song project was originally created for a benefit for the arts center Denniston Hill, founded by Paul Pfeiffer, Julie Mehretu, Lawrence Chua, Beth Stryker, Robin Vachal and kara lynch. For this event Mendi + Keith created their first two praise songs. If the Heavens Don't Hear (A Roller Skating Jam for Marian Anderson) is an R&B song created in honor of the opera singer Marian Anderson. The song was remixed by Gordon Voidwell/WILLS. The Earth Will Hear (for Audre Lorde and Marlon Riggs) was created in honor of the poet Audre Lorde and filmmaker Marlon Riggs.

In Big House/Disclosure (2007) Mendi + Keith created an 8-channel sound-installation in Northwestern University's Kresge Hall. It featured an original house song interwoven with oral interviews with 100 Chicago-area citizens about family history, architecture, slavery and house music. The music in the installation was driven by the real-time changing stock prices of contemporary American companies with historical ties to the transatlantic slave trade, discovered under the ordinance required by the city.

They received a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship to develop an installation and album entitled TaRonda Who Wore White Gloves. Their Internet opera, entitled Four Electric Ghosts, was developed for Toni Morrison's Atelier at Princeton University in 2005 and the Kitchen in New York in 2009. They've curated the sound art exhibition "Ya Heard: Sounds from the Artbase" for Rhizome.org and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Mendi's 2004 book Armor and Flesh (Lotus Press) won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award.

Mendi is a poet and Keith is a composer and sound designer. Their writing and art projects have been featured in Art Journal, Artthrob, Meridians, Black Arts Quarterly, El País and Tema Celeste, in books such as Internet Art (2004) by Rachel Greene, Sound Unbound (2008), edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky, and featured several times on WNYC's New Sounds since 2007.

In 2003 Keith worked with playwright Anna Deavere Smith as sound designer and composer for her play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 at the Lincoln Center Institute, and Mendi's poetry was featured at the Studio Museum in Harlem in response to an exhibition of visual artist Gary Simmons’ work. Also in 2003 they launched "The Pink of Stealth", an Internet/ DVD surround sound work commissioned by the New York African Film Festival and Electronic Arts Intermix, and The Sour Thunder was broadcast internationally from 104.1 FM in Berlin and was released on CD from Bridge Records in 2004. Keith was also awarded a Connecticut Critics’ Circle Award for his sound design work at the Yale Repertory Theater.

In 2002 Mendi and Keith premiered their Internet opera The Sour Thunder (Bridge Records, Inc.) which featured hypertext writings by literary critic Houston Baker, performance artist Coco Fusco and musician DJ Spooky among others. This was the first new media work commissioned by the Yale Cabaret, and the Obadikes launched The Interaction of Coloreds (commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art).

Black.Net.Art Actions is a suite of new media works the Obadikes produced between 2001 and 2003 published in re : skin at MIT Press and available at their then-website blackartnet.com. The works include Blackness for Sale (2001), Keeping Up Appearances (2001), The Interaction of Coloreds (2002), and The Pink of Stealth (2003).

Created in 2001, Keith Obadike's Blackness for Sale was an eBay page advertising the sale of his blackness. An item for sale on the platform typically includes a title or name of the product, a description of its uses, a starting price, and a photograph. For Blackness for Sale, Obadike followed this format replacing the description with a litany of pros and cons of being Black. He gave selling points juxtaposed with “warnings” of the drawbacks of owning a Black identity. The piece furthered the notion that Black people have been homogenized to the point where their experiences have become indistinguishable; to the outside world and the buyer, there is one Black experience. Part of a person is advertised and valued much higher while systematically omitting the other elements that define their personhood. A Black person's most profitable aspect is no longer their physical body but rather other things that encompasses their existence. Black culture has become a new form of capital, the internet where it is exchanged. Black culture can be taken from the internet without having to interact with or acknowledge the Black body, thus erasing Black people. Whereas before, Black people were only valued in capitalist societies for their physical abilities, they are now more so valued for their cultural capital.

In 2000 they created "My Hands/Wishful Thinking", an Internet art memorial for Amadou Diallo. This work, exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in the 2001 group show "Race in Digital Space," generated much discussion both online and off when they offered Keith's Blackness for sale on eBay in 2001 as an Internet performance. Mendi also created the minimalist hypertext piece Keeping Up Appearances, the first Black feminist net.art work.

In 1996 Mendi and Keith started making conceptual Internet art and sound art works together with the goal of creating Internet operas. In 1998 they studied the art and conducted interviews with artists in Ghana on electronic media. After requesting sound submissions from friends by email, they created the Uli Suite a sound art piece based on the Igbo abstract art form.

Mendi Obadike (née Lewis in 1973) and Keith A. L. Townsend Obadike (born 1973) are an Igbo Nigerian American couple who create music, writing, and art. Their music, live art and conceptual Internet artworks have been exhibited internationally. She is an associate professor in Writing and Media Studies at Pratt Institute; he currently teaches in the College of Arts and Communication at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey.

Mendi Lewis Obadike was born in 1973 in Palo Alto, California while her parents were completing graduate work at Stanford. She grew up writing poems, singing in bands and acting in theater as a child. Early on, she experimented making songs with cassette overdubs of her Casio keyboard and computer graphics on a Commodore computer. Her mother's research in linguistics and father's stint as the founding director of Black studies at the University of California at Berkeley sparked her interest in language and culture. Later Mendi studied Latin, became fluent in Spanish and lived and studied in Venezuela and later the Dominican Republic.

Keith A. L. Townsend Obadike was born in 1973 in Nashville, Tennessee. His mother worked as an administrator at the post office and his father (who studied briefly with inventor Buckminster Fuller) was an electrical engineer from Nigeria. While growing up in Nashville, Keith studied classical piano, woodwinds and began programming BASIC on a TRS-80 computer, and worked as a sound designer and producer on the local hip-hop scene. He was subsequently discovered by Kedar Massenburg (Motown Records president) and was signed to MCA records where he worked with R&B artists such as D'Angelo and Angie Stone as well as performed in concert with Lauryn Hill/the Fugees and P-Funk. He later met and was influenced by electronic music composers like Paul Lansky and Olly Wilson while working at Duke University. Keith went on to study painting and digital art at North Carolina Central University and later became the first African-American to earn an MFA in Sound Design from Yale University.