Nayland Blake began displaying their work in 1985. Among their pieces is a
log cabin made of
gingerbread squares fitted to a steel frame, entitled
Feeder 2 (1998). When it went on display at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, visitors furtively nibbled off bits and pieces of the cabin's interior walls, while the smell of the gingerbread filled the gallery. Another work is
Starting Over (2000), a video of the artist dancing with
taps on their shoes in a bunny suit made to weigh the same as their partner at the time. The suit was so heavy that Blake could hardly move as they took
choreographic directions from offstage.
Gorge (1998) is a video of the artist sitting shirtless being hand-fed an enormous amount of food for an hour by a shirtless black man from behind. In 2009, a live version of
Gorge was staged in which audience members fed Blake. Blake has had solo museum exhibition at the Tang Museum and was included in the 1991
Whitney Biennial and that museum's
Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art exhibition in 1994. Maura Riley curated a retrospective of 30 years of Blake's art, "Behavior," which was presented in late 2008–early 2009 at Location One in New York City. In October 2017 Nayland Blake participated in the performance series
Crossing Object (inside Gnomen) hosted by the
New Museum in Manhattan (2017–18). Nayland Blake dressed as Gnomen, a bear-bison creature Blake created as their "fursona." The New Museum described that Gnomen "can change sex and gender" while the furry suit represents Blake's hybrid identity. In 2018 Nayland curated
Tag: Proposals on Queer Play And The Ways Forward at
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Their work is in the collections of the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the
Whitney Museum of American Art, the
Walker Art Center, and the
Des Moines Art Center, among others. Blake is represented by the
Matthew Marks Gallery, and currently lives and works in
New York City. In 2022, Blake participated in the
2022 Whitney Biennial titled "Quiet as It's Kept" curated by
Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin. ==Selected solo exhibitions==