NIKESHA BREEZE B.1979 USA
Working from a Global African Diasporic, Afro-Centric and Afro-Futurist perspective, Nikesha Breeze’s interdisciplinary work reimagines inter-generational traumatic inheritance through the intersection of art and ritual. Nikesha’s work centers Black, Brown, Indigenous, Queer and Earth bodies existing within realms of past, present, and future. Nikesha uses performance art, film, painting, textiles, sculpture, and site-specific engagement to create otherworldly spaces centered on African Diasporic reclamation and honoring. Nikesha’s methodologies call upon ancestral memory and archival resurrection to bring forward the faces, bodies, stories, and spirits that have been systematically erased from the master narrative. Their performance art and film work reimagines relationships with the body, the invisible world, and the social space.
Originally from Portland, Oregon Nikesha Breeze lives and works in the high desert of Taos, New Mexico, on the unceded land of the Taos Pueblo People. Nikesha is an African American descendant of the Mende People of Sierra Leone, and Assyrian American Immigrants from Iran. Nikesha has shown work both nationally and internationally, featured in the MOCADA Museum of Contemporary African Diasora Arts Brooklyn, The Albuquerque Museum, University Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, NkinKyim Museum of Ghana, and various galleries and art fairs across the globe. In 2021 Nikesha’s, 5000 sg ft solo exhibition FOUR SITES OF RETURN, gained national acclaim and was featured in American Art Collector, Hyperallergic, Metalsmith Magazine and the NY times. Nikesha was awarded National recognition at the 2018 International ARTPRIZE exhibition, winning the juried 3D Grand Prize Award as well as the Contemporary Black Arts Award, for their Sculptural installation: 108 Death Masks: A communal Prayer for Peace and Justice. In 2021 Nikesha was a National Performance Network Creative Fund and Development Fund Grant Recipient for their collaborative work , Stages of Tectonic Blackness. In 2023 Nikesha’s work will become a part of a soon to be announced new National Monument.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work is deeply invested in reclaiming both historical narratives of the African diasporic body and the reclaiming of Afro-futures. I work through multiple mediums and interdisciplinary practices. As a large scale oil painter, my work deals with archival imagery of the Black subject through time. I paint life-size figures in monochromatic realism juxtaposed within rich textural, often cracked, and organically weathered surfaces and backgrounds. In this way, I play with historical tension and the palpable spirits of resilience. As a ceramicist and sculptor I work with clay and natural materials to draw from ancestral memory, and earth memory, I sculpt bodies and stories that have been invisibilized within our master narrative and give them voice and form. As a performance artist, I use my own body to press and shape itself into the living memory of the diaspora. I allow time to work through me as a medium, enacting durational mourning rituals and radical reclamations of space. I work in a performative body as an act of Black sovereignty and continued transformation. As an installation artist, I build large scale immersive environments of sacred space. I support engagement of the public body, drawing people into ritual acts of care, of prayer, of witnessing, and of critical accountability. As a writer, poet, and filmmaker I seek the recapitulation of language and narrative as a tool of post-colonial power. From re-configuring western language to creating new codecs of African Diasporic syntax and mapping, I use language as yet again another medium of reclamation.