Nikesha Breeze

Lives and works in Taos, NM, USA

Artist statement

ARTIST STATEMENT My work is invested in reclaiming both the historical narratives of the African diasporic body and the possibilities of Afro-futurity. I approach this through a deliberately interdisciplinary practice that spans painting, sculpture, performance, installation, writing, and film. As a painter, I employ large-scale, monochromatic realism to engage archival images of the Black subject across time. Life-size figures emerge against surfaces that are textured, fractured, and weathered, evoking both the persistence of history and the materiality of memory. As a ceramicist and sculptor, I work with clay and natural materials to excavate ancestral and ecological memory. These works reconstruct stories and bodies rendered invisible within dominant historical frameworks, offering them renewed presence and form. My performance practice positions the body as both subject and medium. Through durational actions, mourning rituals, and spatial interventions, I enact processes of reclamation and sovereignty that are inseparable from diasporic embodiment and transformation. In installation, I construct immersive environments designed as sites of collective engagement. These spaces invite participation in acts of ritual, care, accountability, and critical witnessing, situating the public body within networks of relation and responsibility. As a writer, poet, and filmmaker, I interrogate the power of language and narrative as sites of colonial control and post-colonial...

Artwork