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Nikesha Breeze

@nikeshabreeze

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Mende/Assyrian
INTERNATIONAL ARTIST
INTERDISCIPLINARY PAINTER, SCULPTOR PERFORMANCE ARTIST

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Wow!!! It is such a beautiful and surreal feeling to see something so familiar, a work, spirits, ancestors, you have worked so closely with, that have been the center of your world for so many years, gracing the headlines across the country. What a deep honor to have my work within this world changing monument. Freedom Monument Sculpture park @freedommonument is filled with permanent works from some of the most profoundly powerful black and indigenous artists of our time. Each shaping a part of the narrative and visceral history of African American enslavement and process of emancipation. My work “108 Death Masks: A communal prayer for peace and justice” which began as a large scale ceramic installation in 2018, was commissioned in 2022 by @eji_org The Equal Justice Initiative and Bryan Stevenson to be recreated in Bronze for inclusion in this groundbreaking national monument. This incredible opportunity took me to Ghana where i worked side by side with master bronze caster Ibrahim Allagi Isaka and an incredible small team for 4 months to create this work in West African bronze using archaic original casting methods. A dream realized in the deepest prayer and presence. To see this work finally able to be shared with the world, is beyond words. I am humbled to see the distance this prayer will go. I can finally begin to share with you all what has been so so many years in the making. Thank you @bryanstevenson1959 for believing in me and calling me in to be a part of this historic accomplishment. 🙏🏾 by @nikeshabreeze

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3 years ago

“Anonymous African American Man and Child; 1865” 2020
Oil on Canvas 80”x 68”

click the link in my bio to see the entire installation and exhibition guide.

In this work I am exploring the history of the Black American image through the lens of the first photographs of Black people in the United States between 1850 and 1866. sourcing from early daguerreotype, tintype and emulsion photos, I am reclaiming the images of anonymous Black Americans and rendering them in full-scale oil paintings, as a way to impart the honoring and recognition that these early Black ancestors may have never received in their own time.

Images of Black Americans from the mid-1800s are rare. They are often set in photographic studios, with fake backdrops of European parlors or nature scenes. Which obscures the horrific reality of the racist terror they lived in. This staging, juxtaposed with the reality of the Black American experience, conjures the tension from which I create the oil paintings.
Some of the subjects were enslavesd people who would stand in to “test” the equipment. Others were free Blacks of the North who were working their way through the social classes. Runaway slaves from the South were photographed by abolitionists, who used the images to further their cause towards emancipation but also tokenized the black body as prop. Some of the images were produced as scientific documentation and medical curio, no matter what the “use” the people in these early photographs were not in control of their own image.

Reclaiming these images for Black Americans and the world allows me to showcases these anonymous Black Americans from the national archive with the honor and recognition they deserve. These large scale oil paintings are offerings for our imagination and inspiration towards Black excellence.

music on process videos from my dj mix “Afrofuture Soundsystem” available on soundcloud🥰. SOUND ON

first image by the amazing @katerussellphoto ❤️

install shots from my solo show @formandconcept a few works are up for the rest of the month if you missed it last month.. by @nikeshabreeze

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5 years ago

Have you seen “Arc of Return” in The Woods Before Sunrise: Environment and Place in New Mexico’s Black Contemporary? This is how it came together. @nikeshabreeze

On view through October 18, 2026. taken in Albuquerque Museum by @nikeshabreeze

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2 months ago

Nikesha Breeze’s “Living Histories” (2026) is an Afro-archival, large-scale interactive installation commissioned for the Biennale of Sydney @biennalesydney Curated by Hoor al Qasimi @hooralq unfolding within the monumental White Bay Power Station.

Drawing from the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project Born in Slavery, Breeze works with fragments of over 2,500 firsthand testimonies by African American elders who experienced enslavement as children. These voices are carried forward as a living field of memory, shaped through ritual, ancestral witness, and embodied presence.

At the center, an immense Baobab tree, constructed from over 2,000 meters of cotton gauze, forms the threshold into the work.

A full scale 1850s cabin, suspended cotton fields, large scale cyanotype prints, and a monumental animation across layered gauze panels creating intimate, inhabitable environments where these histories are held, felt, and re-encountered.

Collaborating alongside world class performers, the work becomes a multisensory space of shifting light, breath, and resonance, where history is experienced through performance, original music, spatial sound, and moving image.

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Living Histories, 2026. Biennial of Sydney
cotton gauze, wood, steel, cyanotype prints, furniture, sound, video projection, paper

Construction Lead: Justin Aspen Dudley

Music: Lazarus Nance-Letcher @l.nuzzles

Vocalist: Gina Breedlove @ginabreedlove

Spiritual Guidance: Bronte Velez @littlenows Amara Tabor-Smith @amarat.smith Gina Breedlove

Live performance: Nyaluak Leth @nmmwl , Basjia Almaan @basjiaforever Andrew Bukenya @abpresents Ran Fields @globalrations Yacou Mbaye @yacou_mbaye

Creative Producer: Kelly Dezart-Smith girlwhereyouat

Recorded Readers: Anthony Grace, April Hardy, Bahni Turpin, Bonita Brisker, Brianna S. Powell , Chad Singleton , Naadia Bakhit, Corey Brooks, Elyssa Lassiter, Felicia Boswell, Gayle Samuels, Greer C. Morrison, Jessica Funches, Masud Olufani @olufani , (Jonathan) Matthew Williams, Lauren Jillian Croom, S. Juain Young @juainyoung , William Delaney, Ugarhon Serrette (Sugar Johnson), Charles Reese

Sound Production: Kai Breeze @kaibreeze.mp3 by @nikeshabreeze

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2 months ago

Rememory / Nikesha Breeze @nikeshabreeze

In 2001 the United State’s Library of Congress released Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, a digital archive featuring more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery transcribed from interviews undertaken by the Federal Writers’ Project across 17 US states between 1936 and 1938. Inspired by Born in Slavery, and knowing African American histories are actively being erased, Nikesha Breeze’s Living Histories amplifies these lost voices as an act of archival reclamation.

In Living Histories, an immense African Boab (Baobab) tree sculpted from layered raw cotton gauze and corn, crops integral to the plantation economy of the antebellum South, serves as the gateway to an interactive, immersive installation combining performance, original music, spatial sound, and moving image. The work creates sanctuary-like spaces for intimate histories, reclaiming the voices and knowledge systems of formerly enslaved African American elders whose testimonies form the foundation of the installation. Collaborating with actors, musicians, and digital media artists, Breeze translates archival material into a multisensory environment of suspended textiles, shifting light, and resonant soundscapes that audiences physically move through, positioning history as active, embodied, and present while honouring the lives and cultural knowledge carried within these narratives.

Working from a global African diasporic and Afro-Futurist perspective, Living Histories expands access to collective history and creates space for dialogue between past, present, and future, allowing these histories to continue shaping cultural memory and social consciousness.

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney Courtesy of the artist.

@whitebaypowerstation

Images: Nikesha Breeze, Living Histories, 2026. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy of the artist © Nikesha Breeze. Installation view, 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, 2026, White Bay Power Station. Photograph: Document Photography. by @nikeshabreeze

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2 months ago

Meet one of the artists featured in our summer exhibitions: Nikesha Breeze!

Grounded in a global African diasporic and Afro-Futurist perspective, @nikeshabreeze draws on ancestral memory and archival research to recover stories long erased from the historical record. Their ongoing project combining monumental sculpture, sound, and performance, entitled Living Histories, was recently featured at the 25th Biennale of Sydney @biennalesydney

Their solo exhibition, New Editions, features two new limited edition works published to support Breeze’s ongoing Living Histories Project. The first is a cast-bronze mask created from an artist proof for their landmark installation at the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama (see 1st picture). The second is an archival pigment print of Breeze’s painting Isadora and Mary Noe Freeman draws from the artist’s ongoing Archival Portraiture series which transforms early photographic records—daguerreotypes, tintypes, and emulsion photographs dating as far back as 1840—into paintings honoring Black ancestors whose stories were overlooked or erased.

See Nikesha Breeze’s exhibition until August 8th in person, on our website, or on artsy (see the link in our bio).

Artwork Info:
—Isadora and Mary Noe Freeman, 2026, archival pigment print, 22 x 17 inches, Edition of 50, published by Richard Levy Editions
—Bronze Mask (from the series 108 death Masks), 2026, cast bronze, 7.5 x 4.75 x 3.4 inches, Edition of 18, published by Richard Levy Editions
—108 Death Masks: A Communal Prayer for Peace and Justice (detail of installation), 2022, cast bronze, Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, Montgomery, Alabama

#contemporaryart #nikeshabreeze #richardlevygallery #livinghistoriesproject by @nikeshabreeze

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3 months ago

🌟NEW EPISODE🌟

A chance connection at Yale cracks open a hidden family history and turns legacy into something immediate, unsettling, and real. We talk with interdisciplinary artist Nikesha Breeze about building monuments, reclaiming erased stories, and using grief rituals to transform what history leaves in our bodies.

𝙇𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙣 𝙉𝙊𝙒 on your favorite podcast platform, Substack, YouTube and ArtStorming.org

@nikeshabreeze

#artbridgenm #artstormingpodcast #nikeshabreeze #legacy #artofremembrance #artfulexit by @nikeshabreeze

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4 months ago

Thanks to Ania Hull for the thoughtful piece about Nikesha Breeze, co-curator and exhibiting artist in The Woods Before Sunrise, on view now through October 20, 2026. taken in Albuquerque Museum by @nikeshabreeze

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4 months ago

“The Woods Before Sunrise: Environment and Place in New Mexico’s Black Contemporary”
Albuquerque Museum June 20th-Oct 18 2026. Open Now

What does it mean to belong to a landscape? This is a question I’ve been living inside for years, one that has shaped my sculpture, my research, my relationship to this extraordinary and complicated place called New Mexico. I am so deeply honored to finally bring this exhibition into the world.

“The Woods Before Sunrise” gathers nine artists whose practices are rooted in the high desert, the bosque, the mesa, and the long, textured memory of Black life in the American Southwest. Together we ask: who gets to name a landscape? Who is seen within it, and who has been rendered invisible? These are not abstract questions. They live in the body, in the soil, in the image.

Featuring the work of Ron Adams, Noé Barnett, Nikesha Breeze, Maurice Burns, Karsten Creightney, Jakia Fuller, Jackie Mitchell Edwards, Rein Whitt-Pritchette, and Paula Wilson, with special appearances of Lazarus-Nance letcher, Miles Touknow, Tigre Bailando, Suldano Abdhiruhman, fen, Madeline cesne, and more this show is a testament to the depth, range, and visionary force of Black contemporary art being made right here, right now, in New Mexico.

I am also thrilled to announce that on opening day, Friday, June 20th at 2pm, I will be joined in conversation by artists Paula Wilson and Jakia Fuller, alongside co-curator and Assistant Curator of Art William Gassaway, PhD. We will be speaking at the Albuquerque Museum, and I would love to see you there.

@abqmuseum @abqmuseumfoundation @nikeshabreeze @williamgassoway @paulalights @j.arifuller @karsten.creightney @nb.artistry @jackieedwards1346 @maurice.burns2 #Ronadams #Reinwhittpritchett @ziplockshorty #fenroot by @nikeshabreeze

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4 months ago

Nikesha Breeze’s Living Histories Final Performance LIVESTREAM

I am so deeply moved, honored, humbled, and full of joy and gratitude for this incredible performance and the brilliant collaborators who brought it to life. There are still no words to speak on the generosity of spirit, the care and the true offerings that each person brought. My deepest gratitude to each and every one of you. It is done ❤️❤️

Performers
Nya Leth @nmmwl
Andrew Burkenya @abpresents
Ran Fields @globalrations
Basjia @basjiaforever
Yacou @yacou_mbaye
Nikesha @nikeshabreeze

Producer: Kelly Lovemonster @girlwhereyouat
Music. @l.nuzzles
opening vocals: @ginabreedlove
music production @kai__breeze taken in White Bay Power Station by @nikeshabreeze

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4 months ago

If you visited White Bay Power Station you will have seen it:
A floor-to-ceiling baobab tree made out of white cloth.

Living Histories is a durational performance set within a monumental landscape of ancient Baobab-inspired textile trees that hold and transmit the stories of formerly enslaved African American elders. Performers activate the space through movement, spoken word, poetry, and embodied ritual, guiding audiences into intimate encounters with memory and presence.

Archival voices resonate through a sound composition by Lazarus Nance Letcher, inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s 1930s ethnographic recordings. Embedded throughout the installation, the healing voice of Gina Breedlove becomes a sonic offering, a channel of ancestral care. As audiences move freely through this shifting world of cotton, light, and shadow, performance becomes a living archive. Witnessing becomes a shared act of remembrance.

This performance will take place in and around the artwork installation of Nikesha Breeze. This is located at the southern end of the Turbine Hall, within White Bay Power Station. You can enter the building at any entrance point. Make your way into the Turbine Hall and head to the far, southern end. Please speak to a Front of House Staff member or Volunteer if you have any questions.

Event:
Living Histories Performance by Nikesha Breeze @nikeshabreeze

Location:
@whitebaypowerstation

Date &:
Saturday 13 June, 12 – 12.45 pm

Ticket Info:
Free

Music composed and played by Lazarus Nance Letcher l.nuzzles
Vocals by Gina Breedlove @ginabreedlove
Engineering by Kai Breeze @kaibreeze

#nikeshabreeze #biennalesydney #whitebaypowestation #performanceart taken in White Bay Power Station, Wangal by @nikeshabreeze

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4 months ago

Did we catch your attention in the infinite scroll?! We hope so. But the truth is big tech doesn’t want you to think about thoughtful things 😮

A recent Forbes article pointed out the impact of all that #stolenfocus : “There is a meaningful difference between reading something & processing it. Between watching something & thinking about it. The distinction matters far more than most people realize. The modern content environment is engineered for frictionless consumption: autoplay queues, algorithmically optimized feeds, pre-packaged opinions delivered with minimal cognitive demand. The result is that it’s entirely possible to spend hours absorbing content while doing almost no actual thinking. You finish a scroll session with a vague sense of having been informed, but you cannot recall a single thing you saw.”

In Ep 275 of #wardrobecrisispodcast features deep thinking, system-rocking artist @nikeshabreeze We’re exploring her recent @biennalesydney work inspired by the colonial story of cotton, but we also discuss self-care; the healing powers of sound; capitalism and the commodification of time; our relationship to place, land and each other; how corporations profit from the prison industrial complex - and even make clothing using prison labour.

A useful use of your time, we promise! Link in @mrspress bio to listen in full, or find Wardrobe Crisis wherever you get your podcasts 🎧 by @nikeshabreeze

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4 months ago