In recent decades, avant-garde art has become a viable profession for the energetic and the plucky – and especially the young, driven artists with an eye for trends and a quirky vision. This last ingredient may be the most crucial of all, but it’s also the most difficult to cultivate. Currently on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem is the work of one accomplished young artist who clearly has his own voice, as well as something to say.

The 30 photographs, sculptural installations, and mixed-media works by the Los Angeles-based artist Kori Newkirk (b. 1970) span the years since he received a master of fine arts degree from the University of California at Irvine in 1997. His free-form, interdisciplinary approach and roving curiosity bring to mind the work of Bruce Nauman. Mr. Newkirk’s pieces, however, are girded by the experience of growing up and living as an African-American male in urban areas (with their rich tradition of ethnic culture) as well as northern rural ones (where it was entirely absent). Mr. Newkirk has been associated with “post-black” art, a movement in which personal ambivalences qualify — without necessarily diluting — the polemical punch of identity politics.

Mr. Newkirk’s signature pieces are the beaded curtains that dominate the walls of the Studio Museum’s first-floor gallery. Their shimmering surfaces of carefully strung beads — the “pony beads” that sometimes adorned ethnic hairdos in the 1960s and ’70s — depict urban and rural scenes, and in two cases flame-like abstractions. A half-inch behind the beads, the walls appear at first to have been painted in multiple colors, but this is an illusion created by the shadows of the beads and their surprisingly subtle shifts of hue and transparency.

The information in wall labels adds an extra resonance to many of Mr. Newkirk’s pieces. They disclose, for instance, that the beads are strung on synthetic black hair — another ethnic signifier — while the titles lend new twists to the imagery. “Jubilee” (1999) features fiery shapes of red, orange, and green flicking into a sky-blue region above. In the catalog essay, the artist explains that the title was inspired in part by “The Fires of Jubilee,” an account by Stephen B. Oates of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. Similarly, the title of “Suspect” (2001–02) lends ominous overtones to the scene of a country road at dusk, with a dark wall of trees fringed in yellow as if the image were a low-quality photograph.

The range of Mr. Newkirk’s other pieces reflects an intelligence both quick and supple — disarmingly so at times, as he seems to touch on almost every contemporary gambit of subject matter and technique. The installation includes a site-specific work executed in a gallery corner; a truism spelled out in neon lighting; several close-up photographs of body parts; a pair of identical, suggestively minimal photographs of city scenes, and an encaustic-paint abstraction. Two pieces investigate the stereotype of the African-American affinity for basketball by embellishing actual hoops with extra-long, black, beaded nets. If this message is a little obvious, another work, featuring a city skyline painted on the gallery wall in pomade, offers a more layered statement about racial codings. (In the museum’s foyer, a pungent smell announces another piece executed in this same unusual medium: the giant image of a limo stretching over the reception desk.) “Groton” (2003), a small sculpture of a white shark attempting to devour a large, ornate snowflake, wittily combines the dangerous and the dainty — and also comments on the futile voracity of white consumption.

The most poignant works, however, line the walls of the gallery’s second-floor space. “Channel 9” (1999), a large photograph of the artist standing before a building’s shuttered entrance, captures every detail of its pockmarked brick and graffiti. The artist’s face alone is blurred, like a perp’s in a television crime show. Next to it, “Channel 11” (1999), a grid of nearly 200 squares painted in flat, encaustic hues, deftly summons up the impression of an anonymous, fractured face. Particularly effective is “Par” (2004), a close-up photograph of the artist lying on a daisy-speckled lawn in a dress shirt so preternaturally white it seems borrowed from a laundry detergent advertisement. The artist’s bent arm partially hides his face in a gesture suggesting both repose and self-protection. The work perfectly encapsulates the artist’s ambiguous habitation of his work: on display, but guarded; omniscient yet elusive.

Not to be missed is “Bixel” (2005), a video of the artist moving and spinning exuberantly about a grassy field in a silver loincloth. He discovers strange, glowing spheres amidst the greenery, and at the end shows a mouthful of glitter. The video’s ultimate meanings are unfathomable, but it radiates an impression of personal freedom in a bright, alien world. With this piece, Mr. Newkirk seems to be turning from racial to terrestrial alienation. It will be fascinating to see what this gifted artist does next, and how he grapples with another ambivalence: the sometimes competing rewards of observing one’s own voice, and riding the avant-garde.

Until March 9 (144 W. 125th St., between Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard and Lenox Avenue, 212-864-4500).