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. Inspired by feminist theory and queer subcultures, Blake addresses the contradictions of representation in sculptures, drawings, performances, and videos, particularly as it relates to their own identity as a nonbinary multiracial artist.

Nayland Blake’s work has been shown extensively and was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial, the 1993 Venice Biennale, and the landmark exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994, where they were also included in the 2021 Whitney Biennial. In 2003, a retrospective of their video work was organized by the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Surveys of their work have been organized by Location One in New York and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Nayland Blake: No Wrong Holes, a full-scale retrospective organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, opened in 2019 before traveling to the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2020.