The artist Shikeith, born in Philadelphia, in 1989, as Shikeith Cathey, now goes by just his first name. But that does not mean that he is without antecedents, without family, or without history. With interdisciplinary work spanning photography, installation, film, and sculpture, Shikeith’s practice is in conversation with a rich canon of Black queer men—the documentary poetics of Marlon T. Riggs, the editorial sensibility of Joseph Beam, the ceremonial politics of Essex Hemphill, and the cutting lucidity of James Baldwin.
While Shikeith’s artistic universe addresses a number of masculine literary, musical, and cultural figures, his first universe, if we can call the vexed enmeshments of home a universe, was one of women. “I grew up in a household with my mother and my grandmother,” Shikeith told me recently on Zoom. He is from North Philadelphia but now lives and works some three hundred miles west, in Pittsburgh. North Philly, as it is called, is “kind of known for being the more volatile area, the more impoverished area in Philly,” Shikeith explains about his upbringing. “It was an environment that had limited resources, a place where, because of that, we had to utilize our imagination a lot as children.”
His maternal grandmother was a singer and a poet. “I got a lot of my creative skills from her,” he says, noting that she was very spiritual. “Among regular Black shit that people would expect,” he
