Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Photography, Social Practice, Publishing, Film/Video, Music
Website: sashakelley.co
Sasha Kelley is an Oakland-based multidisciplinary artist who works across photography, publishing, film and video, music, and social engagement. Rooted in the East Bay, Kelley explores intimacy, collective archives, and collaboration with Black, brown, and queer communities. They co-founded The House of Malico, an activist-oriented creative agency that builds paths to financial sustainability for artists and women of color in the Bay Area, as well as the Malidoma Collective. Kelley also hosts and produces Club Proxii, an immersive music and interview show streaming from Oakland’s Lower Grand Radio.
Kelley’s work has been shown at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), the de Young Museum, SOMArts Cultural Center, the San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery, Minnesota Street Project, the Museum of Sonoma County, Krowswork, and Betti Ono, as well as at Casa SoMovimento in Salvador, Brazil. Their work is in BAMPFA’s permanent collection and has been published in The Fader, Umber Magazine, and Black Futures (edited by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham).
Kelley was BAMPFA’s Black Life summer resident artist in 2022, and has held residencies at Minnesota Street Project’s Black Space Residency (2023) and Kala Art Institute’s Parent Residency (2024), along with curatorial residencies at Krowswork and the African American Art & Culture Complex. Honors include a San Francisco Foundation Rapid Response Grant (2018), an Akonadi Beloved Community Grant (2016), and inclusion in the YBCA 100 (2015).
Kelley uses photography, place-making, and social practice to examine Black identity, the creative practice of women of color, cooperative communities, and divine archetypes. Much of the work takes the form of living archives: oral histories, radio, publications, and gatherings that document and sustain creative communities as much as they represent them.
Projects such as B(L)ACK in San Francisco, an online archive and oral history of Black creatives who have lived, worked, or studied in San Francisco, and the Club Proxii community archive presented during the BAMPFA residency, ask how a contemporary archive can be experienced and felt across digital and physical forms. The practice blurs the line between art-making, organizing, and care work, centering collaboration and paid opportunity for the communities it portrays.
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