Nathaniel Donnett (b. Houston, TX) is a cultural practitioner whose practice shapes and holds philosophical and psychological significance.
His work is rooted in Black cultural expression, abstraction, everyday aesthetic theory, vernacular architecture, and the lived experience. Donnett works across diverse media, including mixed-media paintings, sculpture, installation, sound, and video. In addition, he engages with communities through exchanges, interviews, and subtle public works, fostering a participatory practice that forges social relationships between art and life.

Donnett's work situates sociopolitical and cultural concerns, such as the notion of the enclosure and heterotopias, alongside broader themes, such as imagination, dreams, the (in) exterior, and fiction. Additionally, he disrupts linear frameworks by recontextualizing objects and materials from their original context to expand their potential for meaning and to raise questions. Through various processes and culturally coded visual and audio languages, he seeks to mirror the tangible and intangible essence of Black American music. Moreover, his work emphasizes thoughts on the depth of substance, process, the tactile, the imagination of matter, and the richness of working class neighborhoods as conceptual and formal modes of inquiry exploring space and time. This includes considerations of the in-between, the poetic, and the cosmology of Black American phenomena, which Donnett calls Dark Imaginarence.

Dark Imaginarence is a neologism Donnett coined to describe his practice, methodology, and attempts to create new languages within and beyond the framework of art and culture. Dark Imaginarence emphasizes imagination, experience, place, observation, improvisation, spirituality, process, and community. Dark imagination is similar to dark adaptation in that the eye adjusts to darkness. What appears before the eye is not limited to opticality but rather open to material and conceptual inquiry. Dark Imaginarence is musical. It's a polyrhythm and a ghost note, a poetic break between where the note is disturbed and blurred. It is art, before art, after art, or may not be art at all. It is narrative yet anti-narrative. 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. Dark Imaginarence is Black American specific but can also be diasporic and is most definitely human. It is poetic, material, and cosmological. Dark Imaginarence is theoretical and practical blackness. It remains in non-linear rotation. Dark Imaginarence is a way of life where one exists creatively. It is beyond the binary and limited expectation.

Nathaniel Donnett received his B.A. in Fine Arts from Texas Southern University and MFA from Yale University School of Art. Nathaniel is the recipient of the University of Houston Painting / Cynthia Woods Mitchell Fellow and Scholar in Residence (2024-25) Houston Region Affiliated Fellowship at American Academy of Rome (2024),  John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2022), Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship from Yale University (2020 -2021), a Dean's Critical Practice Research Grant and an Art and Social Justice Initiative Grant, both from Yale (2020). Other awards include Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant (2017), Idea Fund/Andy Warhol Foundation Grant (2015), Harpo Foundation Grant (2014), and an Artadia Award (2010).  Donnett founded and published "What's the New News," a newspaper and project that reframed the narratives of historical neighborhoods, (2010 - 2019).  His work has been exhibited nationally 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.