Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste’s (b. 1984, Baton Rouge, LA) practice is motivated by a propensity toward relation with others and a deep sense of curiosity about the world; what he considers to be a type of research. Toussaint-Baptiste is compelled to allow his interests to be challenged and shifted in response to what he hears, sees, feels, and consumes and believes this focus on an ostensibly universal set of experiences generates the space where attentiveness towards the quotidian (listening, looking) becomes political, posing the question which greatest compels him: "How do we give care and keep giving it?" Given the fraught history of bodies-as-property in the United States, and especially the South, that question begs to be asked of property and people, questioning notions of value and, thus, care and how they are ascribed and actualized inequitably. Toussaint-Baptiste doesn't believe there's a singular answer to the question or its implications but considers it a challenge to keep listening and looking and asking. He makes this explicit through a practice that allows the collapsing of sound/music, architecture, conceptual art, and performance to be understood as an ecosystem through which the same set of queries may be posed from many different points of entry, formal and aesthetic.

Toussaint-Baptiste received an MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts from Brooklyn College. Select exhibitions include Pendulum Music: An Arrangement for Four Performers and Geodisic Dome, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2018); Club, Performance Space New York, New York, NY (2018); Evil Nigger: A Five Part Performance for Julius Eastman, The Kitchen, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Study Of ‘Study Of Three Heads’, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (2018); Evil Nigger Part IV and Evil Nigger Part V, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, NY (2017); Who Needs To Think When Your Feet Just Go+ Never Not Doing, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2016). Select awards and residencies include Bessie Award for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design (2018); Issue Project Room Artist-in-Residence (2017); Jerome Foundation Airspace Residency at Abrons Arts Center, New York (2019); Rauschenberg Residency 381 (2019). Toussaint-Baptiste is also a founding member of the performance collective Wildcat!