WE (BEEN) KNEW (2023) Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Aquatint on 290gsm Polar White Stonehenge cotton rag
8 x 10 inches
Edition of 25
2023
Signed by the artist.
Proceeds from the sale of this print sponsor project-based fellowships at Shoestring Press. Each print’s sale represents a month of fellowship and assistance from staff for an artist to complete a project that would otherwise be out of reach. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis starting in 2025.
Aquatint on 290gsm Polar White Stonehenge cotton rag
8 x 10 inches
Edition of 25
2023
Signed by the artist.
Proceeds from the sale of this print sponsor project-based fellowships at Shoestring Press. Each print’s sale represents a month of fellowship and assistance from staff for an artist to complete a project that would otherwise be out of reach. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis starting in 2025.
Aquatint on 290gsm Polar White Stonehenge cotton rag
8 x 10 inches
Edition of 25
2023
Signed by the artist.
Proceeds from the sale of this print sponsor project-based fellowships at Shoestring Press. Each print’s sale represents a month of fellowship and assistance from staff for an artist to complete a project that would otherwise be out of reach. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis starting in 2025.
WE (BEEN) KNEW (2019-2023) is the most recent iteration of a print that began in 2019 to explore Black American vernacular as it relates to temporality and modes of somatic, intuitive, and ancestral knowledge. "BEEN", or the habitual be, has been linguistically theorized as an indicator of habitual action and sometimes an indicator of someone's character (it happens so habitually that it has become a trait). Regionally and familially, we used this stressed BEEN to indicate an intuitive, somatic, or ancestral that went unacknowledged until someone with power or status said the same thing.
It is an implicit indictment of what sorts of knowledge and evidence are valued and an annoyance with how late everyone else is to arrive at what feels like an obvious understanding. For example, "we BEEN knew they weren't going to..." We also used the "BEEN" to call someone out for pretending they don't know something they actually know. For example, "you BEEN knew she wasn't going to..." This last usage reminds me of Toni Cade Bambara's essay, "The Education of a Storyteller," in her 1996 posthumously published essay collection: "I couldn't seem to think my way out of a paper bag--in other words, when I would, you know, play like I wasn't intelligent. [My grandmother would] say, "What are you pretending not to know today, Sweetheart? [...] A remark she would deliver in a wise-woman voice not unlike that of Toni Morrison's as I relisten to it. And it would encourage me to rise to quit being trifling." So, I will leave you with this question: What have you BEEN knew that you refuse to acknowledge? or as Bambara asks, "What are you pretending not to know today, Sweetheart?"
Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s website
About the Artist
A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/her) explores communication practices and poetics across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she was awarded a 2024 High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree; 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Rasheed is the author of seven artists' books: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext (Emerson College and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). She is on faculty at the Yale School of Art, MFA Sculpture Department, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consulting business that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions in designing expansive and liberatory learning experiences
Rasheed is represented by NOME (Americas and Europe).