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. 2021 was National Performance Network

Creative Fund and Development Fund Grant Recipient for their collaborative work ,

Stages of Tectonic Blackness. In 2023 Nikesha’s work will enter the permanent

collection and National archive with a large-scale public installation within the EJI

Legacy Museum in Alabama.

“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. Through my methodologies 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 transformational

power. 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, as a form of critical accountability. As a writer, poet, and

filmmaker I seek the recapitulation of language and narrative as a tool of post-colonial

reclamation.

www.nikeshabreeze.com

nikesh@nikeshbreeze.com

+1 575-613-2193