Nikita Gale

“I’m very interested in infrastructure,” says multidisciplinary artist Nikita Gale, “especially the moments where it applies to social behavior.” Gale’s capacious installations, montages, and performances remix the impedimenta of pop culture and systems of power—barricades, monitors, spotlights, records, wires. In encountering these works, we are provoked to question the role of spectator or witness to political and artistic acts.

Gale was born in 1983 in Anchorage, Alaska. She earned a BA in Anthropology at Yale University and an MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Her solo gallery shows have included LOW MAINTENANCE: i only believe in horsepower now at UCLA’s New Wight Gallery in Los Angeles (2016), HOT WORLD at Reyes|Finn in Detroit (2019), and THANK GOD YOU’RE HERE at 56 Henry in New York (2021). Gale has participated in numerous notable group exhibitions, including Fictions at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2017), Extra Tough at the Anchorage Museum (2020), and Rites of Passage: The Oxygen Biennial in Tbilisi, Georgia. For her debut solo museum show, PRIVATE DANCER, held at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles (2020), Gale deconstructed the apparatus and spectacle of stagecraft with a jumble of trusses and cables emitting a lightshow programmed to a silenced soundtrack. Gale has been awarded several prominent residencies, including at Skowhegan, Coaxial, and Fountainhead. Her bibliography is extensive, with bylines and interviews in Resonance Journal, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art International, Art Journal Open, Contemporary&, and numerous other publications. She is also the author of US VS US (2020), a publication and online project presented by Cloaca Projects.

Gale lives and works in Los Angeles, where is a Visiting Lecture in UCLA’s Design Media Arts program. She also serves on the board of the group relations organization GREX.