Nikesha Breeze
The wildest moments on this show are the ones you cannot script and this conversation delivers one right away. I’m talking with internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist Nikesha Brees while she’s working at Yale University on a multi-year project researching Yale’s history of enslavement and building a monument to the people who built the college. Then a coincidence turns into a confrontation: I share that a Pierpont ancestor helped found Yale, and Nikesha calmly explains that part of her work honors the Luke family, enslaved by the Pierponts, who were key builders of Connecticut Hall. It’s jarring, humbling, and exactly what the art of remembrance asks of us.
From there, we trace how legacy actually gets made through archives, oral histories, and the stories families choose to keep. Nikesha shares her African American and Assyrian roots, the weekly recorded family calls that preserved her mother’s stories, and the lost Black Freedom Town of Blackdom, New Mexico. We also talk about Earthseed Black Arts Alliance, her nonprofit working to break the “tri-cultural” myth and support Black arts and community across New Mexico, including a Taos residency focused on rest, dreaming, and new work.
We go deep on her Sydney Biennale installation built from WPA slave narratives and Library of Congress archives: a 6,000+ square-foot soundscape of reanimated testimony, an 1850s cabin reconstructed from historical detail, and a 65-foot cotton tree shaped as sanctuary. We also explore grief feasts with the Unache Grief Sanctuary, death care as sacred practice, and a powerful lens from Chinese medicine that frames grief through the lungs as a refining process that reveals what’s most precious.
Image Credits:
Isadora and Mary Noe Freeman, archival pigment print published by Richard Levy Editions to support the Living Histories Project, courtesy of Richard Levy Gallery and Nikesha Breeze, On view at Richard Levy Gallery through August 8
Nikesha Breeze at Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, courtesy of Nikesha Breeze
Bronze Mask (from 108 Death Masks: A Communal Prayer for Peace and Justice, published by Richard Levy Editions to support the Living Histories Project, courtesy of Richard Levy Gallery and Nikesha Breeze, On view at Richard Levy Gallery through August 8
