“(King’s music) has elements of a guiding spiritual that floats in the air to give congregants the strength and, yes, the spirit to move forward.”
Bio
Leah King is an artist, musician, and educator. She creates audio installations and interactive visual art works that explore race, gender, power, and queerness through a futurist lens. By incorporating archival photos and first-hand interviews, her layered collages and soundscapes feature historical references, religious texts, layered vocal harmonies, and original electronic music to create abstracted methods of storytelling. Her visual practice uses almost exclusively found materials including hand-cut paper, glitter, diamond dust, fabric, sequins, rhinestones, and lace, while her audio work is inspired by house music, experimental jazz, and gospel, creating a uniquely immersive world.
Artist Statement
Leah King’s sonic and visual art projects are specifically focused on the exploration of futurity as an access point for intergenerational healing - in the words of Robin D.G. Kelley, “Without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down” (Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, 2002). By mining the imagination both in the realm of what we believe our histories to be and what we believe they can become, the work operates in the temporal space where storytelling is both history and possibility. Drawing from aesthetics of afro-futurism, club culture, and science fiction, her work combines sociocultural healing with queer musicology, Black and Judeo historiography, and diasporic studies.
Her current practice is highly interactive, and involves a deeper look at how play is intrinsic to sociocultural revolution by designing multisensory projects that incorporate sight, sound, smell, taste, touch into the museum experience as a practice in both decoloniality and Black futurity.
King’s work has been supported by Brooklyn Arts Council, Berlin Music Board, Museum of the African Diaspora, Headlands Center for the Arts, Puffin Foundation, and Los Angeles Center for Photography. Her work has been shown at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Root Division Gallery, Barrett Art Gallery, Sovern Gallery, and the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum where she was an inaugural artist-in-residence. She was a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Political Power Fellow, Converse Rubber Tracks Berlin Artist Resident, and has presented her work at San Francisco State University, New York University, and California College of the Arts. In January 2025, she presented her research on Black Femmes in House Music at the Dancecult Conference at Technische Universität Berlin, funded by a Center for Cultural Innovation Grant.