Sondra Perry is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, computer-based media, installation, and performance. Perry's work investigates "blackness, black femininity, African American heritage" and the portrayal or representation of black people throughout history, focusing on how blackness influences technology and image making. Perry explores the duality of intelligence and seductiveness in the contexts of black family heritage, black history, and black femininity. "Perry is committed to net neutrality and ideas of collective production and action, using open source software to edit her work and leasing it digitally for use in galleries and classrooms, while also making all her videos available for free online. This principle of open access in Perry's practice aims to privilege black life, to democratize access to art and culture, and to offer a critical platform that differentiates itself from the portrayal of blackness in the media". For Perry, blackness is a technology which creates fissures in systems of surveillance and control and thus creates inefficiency as an opportunity for resistance.
Career
Sondra Perry received a BFA from Alfred University in 2012, and an MFA from Columbia University in 2015. Perry has been an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University School of the Arts as of 2019, where she has taught Advanced Video to both graduate and undergraduate students. Perry has had multiple solo exhibitions, including at The Kitchen, for her work "Resident Evil", and at the Institute for New Connotative Action. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1 The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and online at Rhizome. Perry's video work has been screened at Tribeca Cinemas in New York, Les Voutes in Paris, France, LuXun Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Shenyang, China, and at the LOOP Barcelona Media Arts Festival. From January to May 2017, Sondra Perry had a solo exhibition, flesh out, at Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center in Buffalo, New York. Perry was awarded a 2017 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and the 2017 Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize, which includes a solo show at the Seattle Art Museum and a $10,000 stipend. She has also received the Worldstudio AIGA Scholarship and a scholarship from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, an artists residency in Maine. Perry is the first recipient of MOCA Cleveland's Toby's Prize, valued at $50,000. In 2018 Perry also won the $28,000 Nam June Paik Award given by the Kunststiftung NRW arts foundation to honor artists working in media art.
Black Girl as a Landscape (2010) In Perry's single-channel video installation, Black Girl as a Landscape, the camera slowly pans over the silhouette of a horizontally framed girl, abstracting her body. Perry states this intended to reflect her interest in "the possibility of abstraction as a way of creating dimensionality that connections individual bodies to larger visual and environmental ecologies."
Red Summer (2010) This photo series depicts Perry's grandparents in their backyard obscured by smoke bombs. The photographs reflect the physical destruction seen in cities such as Washington and Chicago during the race riots of 1919, referred to as Red Summer.
Double Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera I (2013) Exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Double Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera I showcases a 30-second loop of a man dancing in a white room looped over 9 minutes. The video was also featured in the Seattle Art Museum's show Disguise: Masks and Global African Art, which toured at the Fowler Museum at UCLA and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, after its Seattle debut.
42 Black Panther Balloons on 125th Street (2014)
With an eye for both the humorous and the political, Perry created 42 Black Panther Balloons on 125th Street, in which she carried a bunch of mylar black panther balloons around town. One still shows the balloons held on a street corner in such a way that it both obscures the person holding them and merges with them to become what is described as an awkward and politically charged body . Some of the same kind of balloons are used in her single channel YouTube video, Black Panther Cam, of a smaller cluster of black panther mylar balloons floating in the artist's studio.
Lineage for a Multiple Monitor Workstation: Number One (2015) This 26-minute two-channel video depicts identity as a construction that can be explored through ritual. Perry developed this piece as a narrative about her family, and includes family memories that are edited between song clips and computer effects.
Resident Evil (2016)
