photograph by Christian DeFonte

Shanekia McIntosh is an interdisciplinary artist who works with poetry and text in performance, public installation, and signage-based works. Her conceptual and research-driven practice explores consumption, memory, dislocation, and myth-building themes.

Based in the Hudson Valley, McIntosh’s work embraces the quiet and the every day—a line of poetry glimpsed while driving, a phrase caught in passing. Her text-based installations draw from the layered history, memory, and culture of each place she engages. She invites moments of pause and subtle disruption by placing works in unexpected public spaces—shuttered theaters, open meadows, strip malls, and train stations. In rural and small-town settings, where visual noise is less constant than in major cities, these works resonate more deeply, catching viewers off guard and shifting their sense of place.


Flow, Catskill Community Movie Theater, 2023

Her work has been presented at institutions including the New Museum, Second Ward Foundation, Charim, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, Hudson Hall, and New York Live Arts. She is the author of the chapbook Spiral as Ritual (Topos Press) and the full-length poetry collection A New Sense of Luxury (Eureka! Press). McIntosh has been an artist-in-residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn and is the inaugural recipient of the Spark of Hudson Foundation Creative Arts Fellowship. She is also a contributing writer for Elephant Magazine.


Writer’s in the rafters, Basilica Soundscape, 2023
                   

CV available upon request