Pamela Council was born in Southampton, New York in 1986.

They are an interdisciplinary artist using sculpture, writing, and performance to create multisensory dedications. Unlike typical memorials, these dedications, including Council’s series Fountains for Black Joy, mine history then use dark humor and bright color in acts of veneration that honor the unsung while critiquing hierarchies of power.

Council coined the term BLAXIDERMY, a portmanteau of Blaxploitation and taxidermy, to describe their distinctive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, which marries the absurdity and horror of the precarity of Black life in a colorful exploration of the material, cultural, and metaphysical. In this world, Council’s transformation of everyday forms and materials is playfully cathartic.— Sneaker outsoles, hair lotion, and acrylic fingernails toy with long-held structures of care and value.

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