Nathaniel Donnett is an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner born in Houston, Texas. His practice shapes and holds metaphysical and phenomenological significance. Donnett approaches his practice through Black aesthetic traditions, everyday aesthetic theory, and the lived experience using various media, such as sourced and reclaimed objects, plastic trash bags, clothing, duct tape, and musical instruments. Donnett employs culturally encoded systems with geometrical and natural phrasing to explore subjects such as fiction, space, time, imagination, race, place, language, and the poetics of the (in) exterior. This approach reimagines and reconsiders the personal, cultural, and sociopolitical associations through form and material. He challenges conventional timeline narratives and disrupts linear frameworks through notions of refusal and incompleteness. By reframing questions about art and aesthetics, Donnett expands meaning with the visual and audio languages of abstraction, vernacular representation, and open forms of architecture.

Donnett works between the intersections of art and life, moving through multiple disciplines such as textiles, sculpture, installation, sound, and video. In addition, he engages communities through exchanges, interventions, interviews, and discussions as a participatory practice, developing social relationships between art and communities. Each idea, object, material, and community activity are poetic fragments that act as polyrhythmic inquiries. These fragmentations serve as contradictions, moments of introspection, and explorations of the unknown and uncertain, attempting to discover the constellations of Black cosmologies.


Dark Imaginarence is a neologism Donnett coined to describe his practice and methodology. Rather than prioritize the object or consumption of the product as the focus, dark imaginarence emphasizes imagination, experience, place, observation, improvisation, spirituality, process, and community. Dark imaginarence is a polyrhythm and a ghost note. It is art, before art, after art, or may not be art at all. Dark imaginarence is neither- either/or - it's both/and. It is a body, mind, and soul composition played by human and spiritual ancestral genealogies. It is poetic, musical, material, doubt, ideas, uncertainty, and cosmological. Dark imaginarence is blackness. Dark Imaginarence is a way of life where one lives creatively.

Nathaniel Donnett was born in Houston, Texas. Donnett received his B.A. in Fine Arts from Texas Southern University and his MFA from Yale University School of Art. Nathaniel is the recipient of the 2024 Houston Region Affiliated Fellowship at American Academy of Rome, a 2022 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Dean's Critical Practice Research Grant from Yale, and an Art and Social Justice Initiative Grant from Yale (2020). Donnett founded and published "What's the New News," a newspaper and project that reframed the narratives of historically African American neighborhoods. Other awards include a 2017 Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant, a 2015 Idea Fund/Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, and a 2014 Harpo Foundation Grant. His work has exhibited at The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; the Mennello Museum, Orlando, FL; the Ulrich Museum, Wichita, KS; Project Row Houses, Houston, TX, The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA, The American University Museum, Washington D.C., The University Museum, Houston, TX, The Kemper Contemporary Arts Museum, Kansas City, MO, The Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury CT, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX, and The New Museum, New York, NY.