Jarrett Key (b. 1990, Seale, AL) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Key grew up in rural Alabama and pursued their fine art practice in New York City after graduating from Brown University in 2013. They received their MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. Key is represented by 1969 Gallery in New York, where they had their first solo exhibition, From the Ground, Up in March 2022. In 2023, Key completed a 40ft mural commission for HMTX Industries in Norwalk, CT. One of their hair performance paintings was also the NYC Pride Grandstand Backdrop at the 2023 Pride Parade. Key is one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for Art and Style 2020. Key’s practice embodies several modes of production in one frame. Through form, image, and material, the objects they make integrate a sculpture, painting, and performance practice. Excavating lost stories and the oral histories that define their upbringing in rural Alabama, Key’s work seeks to criticize those historical conditions that are the seeds of contemporary issues in their life, while creating spaces that celebrate beauty, joy and survival.
Key has been featured in exhibitions and residencies at 1969 Gallery, Fierman Gallery, the RISD Museum, La MaMa Galleria, The Columbus Museum, Gallery 67, Swiss House/MGLC, Galerija Kresija, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Caelum Gallery, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Outlet Fine Art, Former Pfizer Pharmaceutical Factory, Secret Dungeon, La Maison D’Art, Shanghai Theater Academy, and East Meet West Gallery, among others.
Key’s work is in the collections of the New York Historical Society, the Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection, the Columbus Museum, Brown University, RISD Special Collection, the Schomburg Center, the Museum of Modern Art Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, among other institutions. The Hair Painting Series series has been featured at the Studio Museum in Harlem and at the Harlem Arts Festival in Marcus Garvey Park.
Artist Statement
Comprised of cement fresco triptychs, this body of work reflects Key’s ongoing investigation of Black folk tales from the American South. Key’s figures are depicted in flight, soaring in the sky, both recontextualizing common narratives and inspiring the belief in the possibility of touching the clouds. Key’s cosmos contains both Raphael-inspired cherubs and figures from James Van Der Zee’s celebrated photographs of the Harlem Renaissance.
Key’s cement frescos recall and update the ancient art of fresco painting, a style embraced from classical antiquity to the Italian Renaissance to Twentieth Century Mexico. By mixing paint pigment with construction materials, frescos serve to explicate, solidify, and reiterate cultural narratives by literally cementing them in stone. Key’s cement frescos, using the industrial material that defines American cities, continue this tradition as they archive Black folktales, the memory of their own ancestors and family. As three individual cement slabs reach across the walls, a tableau is created. The wall becomes a living landscape, seeking its breath from the audience’s gaze. This installation implicates the viewer to fill in the field embedding the figures.
These paintings, full of red and white stripes with accompanying blue, assert a restratification of American visual identity. Key’s works foreground Southern American folktales of flying Black people as a new way to imagine America from above, a place where a larger and longer history is being viewed and understood. This frame shifts away from the myth of American exceptionalism, colonization and military expansion. Key notes: “ I am Black, I am queer, I am American; this is my country, my history, my legacy.”
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