FUTURE CARE

Jacolby Satterwhite is one of the defining artists of his generation. His conceptual practice centers panoramic digital environments—factories and amphitheaters, sex clubs and gardens—conjuring sci-fi visions of paradise and purgatory. Working across music, sculpture, performance, and immersive installation, this speculative cosmology has deepened 21st-century queer spatial imaginaries. The South Carolina-born, New York-based artist’s meteoric ascent reached a milestone in 2023 when he brought his visionary world-building to The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall. His site-specific installation, A Metta Prayer, transformed the Beaux-Arts space over a three-month run, activated by 12 performances featuring a brilliant cohort of friends and collaborators. All the work on this landmark show ended up having a cost on Satterwhite, who’s a two-time cancer survivor, first diagnosed at age 11. A GoFundMe campaign brought attention to the physical and financial challenges Satterwhite faced navigating post-cancer care, exposing the precarity that can persist long after treatment ends. His experience has since helped inspire a new initiative from the Rema Hort Mann Fund: the Artists Living with Cancer Grant, established in collaboration with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Satterwhite is the inaugural recipient and will be celebrated at the Rema Hort Mann Fund’s 30th-anniversary gala on October 28 at Tribeca Rooftop in New York City. Ahead of the occasion, PIN–UP talked with Satterwhite about the physical toll of creative labor, the vulnerability of accepting help, and his return to artmaking with new maturation and tenderness.

Whitney Mallett: How did the conversation start with the Rema Hort Mann fund?

Jacolby Satterwhite: It started with Carole Server reaching out to me to check on me. She's been very instrumental over the years. She’s helped me network and meld into the art world. I met her in 2013 at Miami Basel. We were at a dinner together for the Whitney because I was in the Whitney Biennial, and I was showing her all the curators who were on Grindr. I was just having fun chatting with her. Since then, she’s always looked out throughout my career. I was really honest about everything that was happening. The complications with my cancer history and my arm going into this state of sepsis shock where it was going to kill me if not addressed. Shortly before that, my gallery shut down unexpectedly, so I lost all forms of support and was frustrated. Carole helped orchestrate this new grant with Susan and Michal Hort of the Rema Hort Mann Fund.

You had cancer as a child.

I had cancer when I was 11. Then again at 17. Then I went into remission. If anything comes back, it’s just removed. But this time, the complications came in the original spot, my right shoulder and arm. Basically my prosthesis had been acting up for ten or 15 years and I hadn't known. It was infected. The body was attacking it. Something worse than a cancer tumor happened, osteomalous, which is a bone infection, and basically it exploded out of my arm. I had a big hole in my arm, and it was leaking puss and blood every day. They thought they were gonna have to amputate it. Death was a real possibility, which is very existentially mind-boggling. So we went through a rigorous surgical and treatment process, and luckily, when my arm exploded, it was supposed to become like a sepsis thing and kill me, but my arm ingeniously created a passage where on its own it was draining out the infection for months. I had to take severe antibiotics every single day for a year and a half. My body's just a mess. I'm always dizzy. I have a lot of side effects from that. I can barely function sometimes, but I had a very successful surgery. I've just been trying to maintain. It's hard for me to operate in the world. I’m always tired, but I’m getting better. I’m figuring out how to reapproach my practice. But with the help of the Rema Hort Mann Fund and my GoFundMe, I've maintained stability and I've found myself again. I've had space for the first time in my life. For so long, I felt like I was always on a hamster wheel. Like an extreme hamster wheel. No breaks. Neglecting everything.

I know the work you do is extremely time-consuming.

Absolutely.

I don’t think it’s legible to everyone exactly how much labor goes into making these virtual reality environments.

It caused this. I can see the pipeline. How it led to my body saying, “I can't do this anymore.” Because it wasn’t very friendly to me. Ergonomically, I was sitting in a chair at a screen from seven in the morning until nine at night, and then I’d get drunk at the bar. It was a weird cycle. Very unhealthy. I love that labor intensity. I love watching 12 seasons of Housewives while doing some rotoscoping and encoding in Python and Maya. It’s like I’m watching the whole Breaking Bad series while deconstructing software and something much more poetic is happening on the right monitor. That’s my happy place. But there’s a lot of anxiety around it, and staring at screens for that much time can be very psychologically taxing. That's not caring for yourself at all.

When I saw your GoFundMe, and read about how illness was so much a part of your story since childhood, and then saw the outpouring of support from your community, it gave a new lens for your work. Its themes of care and collective imagination. And also some specific phrases or titles.

We Are In Hell When We Hurt Each Other.

Yes, and there’s one with love.

Love will find a way home. My mom had schizophrenia. She wrote songs. She made Da Vincian inventions and architectural renderings. I took her archive and used it as, like, a Morse code for my own discovery in the world.

I remember that room of all her invention drawings at your Pioneer Works show.

She always plays a part in the work in some way. I have a band named Pat, which is her name, and I take hundreds of her songs and sample them, but then I make really weird electronic music soundscapes that are rooted in real electronica. It's like I inherited an architectural firm or a design firm [laughs]. I’m carrying the lineage forward, and her analog drawing brings tactility to a much more callous and cold digital art form, like working in Maya 3D. Taking someone’s visionary art made of graphite pencils from over 20 years ago and repurposing them to be these Boschian landscapes that tell stories of political movements.

You build these digital worlds, which themselves are their own infrastructures. Sometimes they have a real world referent like the underground nightclub The Spectrum which is also artists building a DIY infrastructure. Your recent health crisis puts a spotlight on the lack or failure of the healthcare system. And then you see what emerges from that lack, whether it’s mutual aid or this new grant for artists with cancer. There’s a parallel to how something like The Spectrum emerges: people don’t have a welcoming space to party and then they build their own for their community. Alternative infrastructures emerging to address the gaps of existing systems. I wonder how your practice ends up in conversation with some of these experiences.

I love artists who the candle is burning at both ends because the personal and the political are so naturally interwoven. You're constantly waking up and breathing markmaking. If you breathe out the work, it's like plein air painting when you take your easel and canvas out into the landscape. I think about that in the way I operated and brought Spectrum and community practice into my work and how everything is reflective in a more conceptual way. It's like painting light, but I’m bringing digital light in. I’m recording, archiving, bringing in receipts and drawings. I’m a scavenger of ephemera from the good, bad, and ugly. Whether it’s the transgressive, queer, sex-positive scenes of Downtown New York and Brooklyn. Or, this new era of my life, domesticity with my partner. We have our own little insulated world where I'm finding poetry and harmony. There’s some language coming out of that in real time. It feels like Bjork’s Vespertine album. It’s very tender. And I’m 40 now, so I welcome the tender. There’s also anger, fear, and vulnerability. With my community helping me, it was really embarrassing. I was really ashamed. I didn’t want to be seen because I was so sick and not myself, and I felt like I was gonna die. But now I'm scared because I don't know what to say to everyone. Like I'm so sorry. I felt like a dog going into the woods to lay down and let himself go. I felt like I was doing that. Now, I feel better but I’m still figuring it out.

How long ago was your Met show now? It was this amazing moment, and it came right before these health complications emerged.

It almost destroyed me regarding the labor.

Right, the amount you were working, sitting on that chair.

I took four cold showers a day for three months before the show. I slept like twice a week making that show. Oh my god, it was so painful. Then during the show, I had a performance every Saturday. Each time with a different act like Kelsey Lu, Kindness, KUKII, Moses Sumney, and I had to get their visas and fly them out. I was doing so many things and on a lot of Adderall to stay up, and just keep going. I think that was a part of the crash.

Because often your body waits until after a deadline.

When the show opened, I still had to go the next day and the next day and the next day because the show was an active art piece that was being nurtured and cared for. There were 12 performances that activated the space in a different way. It was the best time of my life. I walked into the Met and felt like, for the first time, all the sacrifice and idiosyncratic things were an investment into this long-term goal. It felt like this fruition and manifestation. At the same time, I was so sad every minute that would go by in that building because I knew that the joy I felt was fleeting. Eventually the show would come to an end. It was the most incredible experience seeing a 50-foot giant poster of my work with my name on it next to the Manet. What the fuck? Manet is a big, big, important inspiration for my work. Luncheon on the Grass! I was the first to do a lot of things at the Met. I’m the first artist in history to have a solo exhibition in the Great Hall like that. The first artist to black out the dome. I broke a lot of rules.

There was that New York Post article.

The moms tried to cancel me.

It was very major.

It was so fun and lovely and painful, and it almost killed me because it accelerated some of my complications. I want to do it again. I feel like I’ve matured.

You can’t help but transform when you go through something like that.

I did the Lincoln Center and the Met Great Hall back-to-back. At the same time I was working on the visuals for Perfume Genius’s album and tour. There was a lot happening. There wasn’t enough negative space for my pores to open up and receive anything else to be inspired by, so I just felt like I was churning. I don’t feel like that anymore. I’m so ready for the next chapter.