Najee Dorsey

Najee Dorsey is an artist whose practice embraces the enduring rhythms of Black
Southern life. Hailing from Blytheville, Arkansas, Dorsey’s practice is rooted in
photomontage, mixed media, and layered visual storytelling. Working across
photographic elements, found textures, digital collage, painting, and assemblage, Dorsey
builds richly constructed images that move between personal history and collective
memory. His work explores Black resistance, Southern memory, migration, music, and
ancestral presence through visual worlds shaped by juke joints, lived interiors, cotton
fields, and crossroads.

Dorsey’s photomontage works extend this practice through a deliberate process of visual
construction. Rather than reproducing a painting or presenting a single photograph, each
image is built from layered fragments that are repositioned, scaled, and integrated until
they form a unified composition. The completed work does not exist before this process
begins; it emerges through assembly, revision, and resolution as an original image
conceived specifically for the printed form.

In this way, Dorsey approaches photomontage in conversation with the traditions of fine
art printmaking. Much like a printmaker develops a plate, stone, or screen as the source
for an edition, he builds a visual matrix through a digital layered construction. The
editioned print becomes the primary expression of the artwork, carrying forward his
commitment to memory, materiality, cultural storytelling, and the preservation of Black
Southern life.