{"id":2010861,"date":"2026-06-25T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2010861"},"modified":"2026-06-25T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T06:00:00","slug":"satchel-lee-builds-astonishing-new-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2010861","title":{"rendered":"Satchel Lee Builds Astonishing New Worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/New-Talent-2026-Web-Banner-SL.jpg?w=1000″]<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\n\tIt\u2019s in the gentle, nibbling work of Satchel Lee that astonishing new worlds are built, new terms set. Like Kevin Jerome Everson, Callie Hernandez, and Hong Sang-soo, her attuned senses find, all around her, beauty in the \u201ctiny morbidly life-worn detail,\u201d to borrow a phrase from critic Manny Farber. Beauty: that too-maligned word. Lee\u2019s photographs, videos, miniatures, and music videos testify to a perpetual astonishment. \u201cI love people so much,\u201d she tells me, joyfully. \u201cI love to hear people talk and be. I like narrative, but it can be a bit\u2014hmm\u2014boring? Too neat<\/em> \u2026 versus when you see a second of someone\u2019s face changing; that can say so much more than words.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLee has worn many hats. She grew up in New York City, dancing and choreographing. In college, she creative directed Dr\u00f8me<\/em>, a queer youth magazine, while studying film at New York University; she got her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has filmed commercials; shot portraits of intimates ranging from friends to her father, Spike; written zines; and directed music videos\u2014the latter venture resulting in two simple, breathing jewels for the Panamanian singer-songwriter Sof\u00eda Vald\u00e9s, \u201cIn Bloom\u201d and \u201cI Hate the Beatles\u201d (both 2022).<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>
Photo by Satchel Lee for Immanuel Wilkins\u2019s album The 7th Hand, 2022.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tHer MFA thesis, What a Gift<\/em> (2024), explores in photograph form the figure of family through self-aware, staged portraits in a brown, Deana Lawson-ish living room: mother (played by the artist herself), father, grandmother, daughter. In the accompanying video\u2014softly inspired by Black Journal <\/em>creator William Greaves\u2019s ultimate metafictional mindfuck Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One<\/em> (1968), which Lee tells me is a key touchstone for all her work\u2014we realize they are actors performing as \u201cfamily,\u201d the idea of a Black bourgeois unit. As the figures shift into smiling poses, a voiceover conversation between Lee and a maternal interlocutor filigrees and wrinkles our interpretation of the images with varying shades of approval, curiosity, and melancholy. At one point, the maternal voice trembles and cries: \u201cThis makes me really emotional. Seeing you as mother, in this family<\/em> context \u2026 I haven\u2019t seen you in this way yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHer first solo exhibition, \u201cWhere We Find Ourselves\u201d (2025), at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, investigated that city\u2019s Freedmen\u2019s Town, one of the ad hoc communities founded by formerly enslaved Black people in several states after Juneteenth 1865. Lee built miniature models of Houston\u2019s surviving Freedmen\u2019s Town buildings, photographed them, then enlarged the images to massive proportions. To accompany the show, she filmed a Black Journal<\/em>-esque documentary interviewing four current residents of Houston\u2019s Freedmen\u2019s Town. In it, one teacher calls it \u201choly grounds,\u201d reminding her students that \u201chistory is not gonna always be in a book. There are walking books around here. Talk to your grandmothers, talk to your great-grandmothers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>
Satchel Lee: She Had Land and It Still Stands (Isabel Simms House)<\/em>, 2025.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tTrue history, Lee suggests, resists commodification and cannot be reduced to a value determined by 21st-century real estate. \u201cI think a lot about memory as material. How families get involved and pass down memory. Mythmaking. Inheritances. I am interested in events\u2014rendering buildings through memory, buildings that may be falling apart, may be in disarray, but that are still present<\/em>.\u201d With living ghosts all around, Lee implores us to listen to the whisper.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/columns\/satchel-lee-spike-daughter-1234790122\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/New-Talent-2026-Web-Banner-SL.jpg?w=1000″] It\u2019s in the gentle, nibbling work of Satchel Lee that astonishing new worlds are built, new terms set. Like Kevin Jerome Everson, Callie Hernandez, and Hong Sang-soo, her attuned senses find, all around her, beauty in the \u201ctiny morbidly life-worn detail,\u201d to borrow a phrase from critic Manny Farber. Beauty: that too-maligned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2010861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2010861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2010861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2010861\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2010861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2010861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2010861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}