Tiona Nekkia McClodden is an American visual artist, filmmaker, and curator renowned for her research-driven practice that examines race, gender, sexuality, and systems of power. Working across sculpture, film, installation, and performance, McClodden engages archival material, ritual processes, and embodied inquiry to confront the histories that shape Black and queer life.

Through durational research projects, archival excavation, and ritual processes, McClodden engages histories of devotion, violence, and liberation. Her work often draws from spiritual traditions, personal narrative, and the lives of Black feminist and queer thinkers, creating immersive environments that foreground embodied knowledge and lived experience. These interventions question how authority is constructed, how histories are inherited, and how marginalized identities are remembered or erased.

McClodden’s art fuses critical theory with material experimentation, reframing installation and film as spaces for reckoning and repair. Through sustained inquiry and collaborative engagement, she invites viewers to confront the layered histories embedded within Black queer life and to reconsider how care, discipline, and resistance shape collective memory.

Highlights:

• McClodden earned a BA in Art History from Clark Atlanta University and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York.
  

• Major solo exhibitions include presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the New Museum, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle.
  

• Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021) in recognition of her research-driven, interdisciplinary contributions to contemporary art and Black feminist discourse.
  

• Served as a curator and artistic director of Conceptual Fade, a multi-year research platform centering Black performance, ritual, and lineage.
  

• Her work is held in significant public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Brooklyn Museum; and other major institutional collections.
  

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Click the link to learn more about Tiona Nekkia McClodden and her work through her website and Instagram. Watch the video below!

Tiona Nekkia McClodden, “NEVER LET ME GO | XLIV. the zenith”, 2025

“PURE GAZE” – White Cube, New York, NY, USA (September 3 – October 18, 2025)

This solo exhibition by Tiona Nekkia McClodden presents new works from her ongoing NEVER LET ME GO series, exploring abstraction, constraint, and devotion through material intensity and conceptual rigor. Working with leather, rope, metal, and sculptural form, McClodden examines the politics of discipline, pressure, and care within Black queer life. Through pared-down forms and charged material relationships, PURE GAZE invites viewers to confront how bodies are shaped, restrained, and held, positioning abstraction as a site of resistance and embodied inquiry.

Past Exhibitions

• “A MERCY | DUMMY” – White Cube, Bermondsey, London, United Kingdom (February 14 – March 24, 2024)
  

• Tiona Nekkia McClodden: Play Me Home –  Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, USA (September 13, 2023 — May 12, 2024)
  

• “Tiona Nekkia McClodden: Play Me Home” – Xavier University Art Gallery, Cincinnati, OH, USA (December 13, 2021 – January 23, 2022)
  

Featured Artworks

Tiona Nekkia McClodden, “Play Me Home” , 2010 - 2023

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