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View Nayland Blake's new outdoor installation and commission "Haunt": Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre, presented with performances, activations, and workshops.
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Get matched →Opening June 27, 2026, Art Omi will present Nayland Blake's "Haunt": Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre, a new commission and the artist's first outdoor installation. It will be accompanied by performances, activations, and workshops across Art Omi's park and gallery.
"Haunt" draws upon the history of the ornamental hermit, a novelty of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which a wealthy landowner would hire a man to live alone in a humble dwelling on their estate for a term of seven years. Victorya Spectre, the figure referenced in the work's title, is Blake's alter ego spawned in 2013. In this newest iteration, Spectre appears as a cross between a sibyl and a cryptid, a mysterious creature dispensing fragments of insight from their studio/nest. The project raises questions about fantasy, labor, aging, and the conditions of daily life.
"Haunt": Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre is on view in the Newmark Gallery until January 10, 2027. The exhibition in the Sculpture & Architecture Park is on view until the fall of 2030.
Since the late 1980s, Nayland Blake has constructed an influential body of work exploring play, eroticism, and the subjective experiences of desire, power, and loss. Blake is a nonbinary multiracial artist whose work has been included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial, the 1993 Venice Biennale, and the Whitney Museum's 1994 exhibition "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art." Blake is currently Co-Director of the Studio Art Program at Bard College.
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