Nathaniel Donnett

Nathaniel Donnett is an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner born in Houston, Texas. His practice holds metaphysical and phenomenological spaces that explore history, space/time, the interior/exterior self, and race. Black aesthetic traditions, music, fractal theory, incompleteness, and sacred geometry are strategies he uses to challenge conventional timeline narratives and Western frameworks. To reference the vastness of Black social life, Donnett takes an expansive approach to materiality. By experimenting with visuals and audio as language through abstraction and vernacular forms, the works highlight poetics within the everyday. His practice fuses immaterial and material worlds to a spectrum of media, expanding meaning around sociopolitical concerns and liminal spaces that impact underrepresented people and overlooked conditions.

Donnett received his BA in Fine Arts from Texas Southern University and MFA from Yale School of Art. He is a recipient of a Dean’s Critical Practice Research Grant and an Art and Social Justice Initiative Grant at Yale, a Houston Arts Alliance Grant, and an Idea Fund/Andy Warhol Foundation Grant. From 2011 to 2019, Donnett published the newspaper project What’s the New News. His work has been exhibited at The Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Project Row Houses, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the New Museum.