Nathaniel Whitfield’s work engages in a site-reflexive examination of labor, race, gender and class. His various engagements overlap, conflate, and diverge as his artistic roles shift between performer, collaborator, organizer, writer, curator and director. Nathaniel works with groups to investigate democratic dissensus, fragmentation and difference. Utilizing the critical methodology developed by contemporary cultural studies his work takes the form of performance, video, installation, public action, and education. He seeks to be in dialogue with, to rearticulate and to rematerialize the physical, political, discursive and linguistic spaces we inhabit. His practice traverses an exploration of vocality and the material and symbolical conditions of the voice. Whilst interrogating the ways that people fall together and come apart he is interested in how various structures, institutions and architectures contain and facilitate such movements. He investigates the grammar of collectivity: how we construct and maintain social organizations and how these organizations are active social agents themselves.
Nathaniel received a BFA in Art from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford; was a William Alexander Fleet Fellow in Princeton University’s Department of Art & Archeology; and a studio participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. At UCLA he is a Graduate Student Researcher for the Prison Education Program and was recently appointed as a Collegium of University Teaching Fellow (CUTF) for his class “Performance in Motion: Performance, Politics, Pedagogy.”
Stage Directions (UAW 2865)
is a two-channel video stemming from a series of workshops held with the UCLA graduate student workers union (UAW). In these workshops performative and pedagogical exercises facilitated a dialogue around precarious work, organizational structures, inherited narratives and how these terrains play host to performances of power.
Special thanks to the workshop participants:
Gaby Barrios, Michael Dean, Ethan Hill, Jonathan Koch, Yunyi Li
And the wider community of members and organizers of UAW 2865.
Please find more information on the Union at their website: https://uaw2865.org/
UAW 2865 is the union that represents all 19,000+ Academic Student Employees—Teaching Assistants, Graduate Student Instructors, Tutors, and Readers—across the University of California system.
Together, we collectively bargain for better working conditions and work together for a workplace free from racism, sexism, and all forms of oppression.
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