Performers
Location
About
M. Lamar: Zine Launch
When: Aug 01, 3 PM
Where: Art Omi
This summer, Art Omi will premiere Nayland Blake’s "Haunt": Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre (2026), the artist’s first outdoor installation, accompanied by performances, activations, and workshops across Art Omi’s Sculpture & Architecture Park and gallery.
Celebrate the launch of a new zine by M. Lamar and a limited edition by Nayland Blake with a dialogue between the artists as they explore the figures of the vampire, cryptid, and more. Attendees receive complimentary copies of Lamar’s zine and Blake’s limited edition.
Free and open to the public. RSVP essential.
About the artists:
Nayland Blake
Since the late 1980s, Nayland Blake (b. 1960, New York, NY) has constructed an influential body of work exploring play, eroticism, and the subjective experiences of desire, power, and loss. Inspired by feminist theory and queer subcultures, Blake addresses the contradictions of representation in sculptures, drawings, performances, and videos, particularly as it relates to their own identity as a nonbinary multiracial artist.
Blake’s work was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial, the 1993 Venice Biennale, and the landmark exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art” at the Whitney Museum (1994). Blake co-curated the exhibition “In A Different Light: Visual Culture, Sexual Identity, and Queer Practice” (1995) with Larry Rinder at the University Art Museum, Berkeley. “Nayland Blake: No Wrong Holes,” a retrospective organized by the ICA LA, opened in 2019 before traveling to the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2020. Blake’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
In 2025, Duke University Press published My Studio Is a Dungeon Is the Studio: Writings and Interviews, 1983–2024, an anthology of Blake’s collected writings edited by Jarrett Earnest. Blake is currently Co-Director of the Studio Art Program at Bard College.
M. Lamar
M. Lamar is a composer who works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture, and installation to craft sprawling narratives of radical becomings. Lamar holds a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Yale School of Art sculpture program before leaving to pursue music.
Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876 -Now, EMPAC at Rensselaer, The Rewire Festival in The Hague, Trauma Bar Berlin, Atrium na Žižkově Prague, The Manhattan School of Music, Wellcome Collection London, The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Funkhaus Berlin Germany, Kunstgebäude Stuttgart, The Meet Factory in Prague, National Sawdust New York, The Kitchen New York, MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, Merkin Hall New York, Issue Project Room New York, The Walter and McBean Galleries San Francisco; Human Resources Los Angeles; Wesleyan University; Participant Inc., New York; New Museum, New York; Södra Teatern, Stockholm; Warehouse9, Copenhagen; WWDIS Fest, Gothenburg and Stockholm; The International Theater Festival, Donzdorf, Germany; Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York; Performance Space 122, New York; and African American Art & Culture Complex, San Francisco; among others.
Mr. Lamar continues to study classical and bel canto technique with Ira Siff, and is a recipient of a 2016 Jerome Fund Grant for New Music (JFund), a 2016 NYFA Fellowship in Music and Sound, and grants from Material Vodka (2016), the Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2015), Harpo Foundation (2014–2015), and Franklin Furnace Fund (2013–14).