Tiona Nekkia McClodden is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, writer, and curator based in North Philadelphia. Through her research-based practice, McClodden explores ideas around race, sexuality, gender, and social commentary.
Read MoreBorn in Blytheville, Arkansas, McClodden spent her formative years in the American South. She initially studied film and psychology at Clark Atlanta University in the early 2000s, before completing a film and video apprenticeship with Larry Steele at Atlanta's Spelman College in 2004. While in Atlanta, McClodden worked with the punk and club subcultures, before moving to North Philadelphia in 2006.
McClodden works across film, painting, sculpture, and installation.
The Brad Johnson Tape (2017) is a ten-part VHS video series recognising the writer Brad Johnson, who died of AIDS-related complications in 2011. McClodden's film pays tribute to the legacy of Johnson, whose poems, essays, and correspondence explored the emotions and frustrations of an out gay Black man in the 1980s.
McClodden was compelled to produce this film when she discovered Johnson's poem, On Subjugation (1988). Profoundly moved by Johnson's use of language, she began researching Johnson's life and career, and found an affinity in Johnson's articulation of the anger and sadness he experienced as a minority. McClodden was also influenced by Johnson's juxtaposition of romantic language with aggressive, sexually-charged texts.
In The Brad Johnson Tape, McClodden reads Johnson's texts aloud while engaged in BDSM exercises. One scene features McClodden beating herself with a latex rope, while reading an essay by Johnson that narrates an overwhelming sense of internalised oppression.
In 2019, McClodden presented I prayed to the wrong god for you (2019) at the Whitney Biennial. The three-hour film runs on an infinite loop and documents the artist's symbolic pilgrimage across the United States, Nigeria, and Cuba. McClodden's film explores cultural and historic narratives while experimenting with different forms of filmmaking.
McClodden's solo exhibition, The Trace of an Implied Presence (2022) at The Shed, New York, comprised a multichannel video installation driven by the artist's research into Dance Black America, a festival held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983.
Depicting Black dancers and choreographers through projected archival dance footage, The Trace of an Implied Presence also features McClodden's own documentation of the Philly Bop, a Black social dance originating in Philadelphia. The installation included four dance floors upon which footage was projected.
The Trace of an Implied Presence offers an opportunity to observe archival footage in tandem with contemporary Black dance, underlining the importance of documenting significant cultural movements and traditions.
Represented by White Cube since July 2023, McClodden held A MERCY | DUMMY, her first solo exhibition with the gallery's London location, in 2024.
A MERCY, one of the two bodies of work featured in the exhibition, comprises a series of painted steel head gates that McClodden employs to draw parallels with American writer Toni Morrison's eponymous novel from 2008. Set in late colonial America, the book charts the stories of indentured or enslaved characters and the duality of violence and mercy they encounter.
DUMMY consists of an immersive installation and leather paintings inspired by the 1958 play The Blacks: A Clown Show, written by French novelist and playwright Jean Genet. Intended to play out by black actors before a white audience, Genet proposes that, in the case of a black audience, a white person is invited to the session, referenced by black spectators wearing white masks, or substituted with a dummy. McClodden borrows visual motifs from the play, including original masks that were used in productions in Paris and New York, to consider notions of violence and interiority.
McClodden has received several awards and fellowships, including the Magnum Foundation Fund (2018), Guggenheim Fellowship (2019), Princeton Arts Fellowship (2021–2023), and the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2022).
McClodden has participated in a number of artist residencies, including ONE/OFF Genesis Cohort (2021), Headlands Center for the Arts (2020), Carter-Johnson Leather Library Scholar & Artist in Residence (2019), and the PICA Creative Exchange Lab (2018).
Tiona Nekkia McClodden has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Solo exhibitions include A Mercy | Dummy, White Cube Bermondsey, London (2024); MASK / CONCEAL / CARRY, 52 Walker, New York (2022); The Trace of An Implied Presence, The Shed, New York (2022); Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic, Movement III – The Triple Deities, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia (2021); Hold on, let me take the safety off, Company Gallery, New York (2019); CLUB, Performance Space New York, New York (2018).
Group exhibitions include Olvido, Sombra, Nada, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Mexico City (2022); New Grit: Art & Philly Now, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2021); Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York (2021); Enunciated Life, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2020); Love and Ethnology – The Colonial Dialectic of Sensitivity (after Hubert Fichte), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2019).
Tiona Nekkia McClodden is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden's website can be found here, and her Instagram can be found here.
Phoebe Bradford | Ocula | 2022
![DUMMY [MELANCHOLIC RESTRAINT] by Tiona Nekkia McClodden contemporary artwork sculpture, mixed media](https://files.ocula.com/anzax/06/0609a981-de5a-4f13-bc31-2c6d9eb390ce_600_450.jpg)
![The Brad Johnson Tape [REPAIR] by Tiona Nekkia McClodden contemporary artwork sculpture](https://files.ocula.com/anzax/91/91fe59d3-7544-4f44-a39f-9f979c69593c_600_450.jpeg)
