Nikesha Breeze

Working from a Global African Diasporic, Afro-Centric and Afro-Futurist perspective, Nikesha Breeze reimagines the possibility of healing inter-generational traumatic inheritance through the intersection of art, ritual and remembrance. Breeze identifies as black, queer, intersex, a mother, and alive. Breeze creates spaces where Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Earth bodies can be seen as undeniably sacred and inviolable. Breeze’s work centers Black bodies as they are, simultaneously existing within realms of past, present, and future. Breeze uses performance art, film, painting, textiles, sculpture, and site-specific engagement to build a counter-narrative of an Otherwise. Breeze’s methodologies call upon ancestral memory and archival resurrection to surface faces, bodies, stories and spirits that have been systematically erased from the master narrative. Breeze’s performance reimagines relationships with land, inhuman life, and the invisible world -- a world of dark hands carrying rum and tobacco to the door of no return. In the words of Dionne Brand, “You are still alive, they said. Yes we are still alive. They looked at us like violet; like violet teas they drank us. We said here we are...”. 

Each of Breeze’s works seeks to engage the viewer in a relationship of the soul, a personal act of witnessing and being witnessed. It’s a form of Loving. Of Returning. Of Shaping. Of Reclaiming and Remembering. In Breeze’s art, which is their life, they want to touch the world, as they are touched. Wound touching wound. 

In short, Breeze architects a realm of indivisibility between black artistic aesthetic, black time, and ritual-spiritual healing. This work palimpsests with artists such as Betye Saar, Allison Saar, Nick Cave, and Anselm Kiefer.  Black pasts become reinformed by Black futures, and the resulting present is experienced as a living altar and artifact.