form & concept | 4/26-6/15 | Santa Fe, NM

Homage

Multidisciplinary artist Nikesha Breeze presents a major body of work at form & concept.

Nikesha Breeze’s forthcoming exhibition at form & concept is something monumental to behold. The culmination of pouring their passion and soul into their artwork for the past two years, Breeze’s exhibition beginning this April will feature more than 125 sculptures, five large-scale oil paintings, seven large charcoal drawings, a video installation, 40 screenprints, a printed book of poetry, live performance and a massive central installation work. “My latest body of work is centered around the working title and theme, Four Sites of Return: Ritual, Remembrance, Reparation, and Reclamation. These four themes are expressed in multiple mediums throughout the exhibition. Over the last two years I have been working on creating, researching and dreaming this show into existence,” says the artist.Two African American Boys Facing Front, oil on canvas, 64 x 50"

Living in the high desert of Taos, New Mexico, on unceded Tewa Pueblo land, Breeze is an interdisciplinary artist identifying as Black and Assyrian, their artistic focus “Afro-centric and Afro-futurist, building on archival and historical research of the Black body, Afro-futurist conceptual design and the presence of human fragility and resilience.” The aforementioned large-scale central installation features what Breeze calls The Arc of Return, a conceptual vessel that symbolizes the elusive idea of “Return” for displaced and diasporic bodies, coupled with the play on words “Ark” and “Arc.” The installation is a life-size boat made from hand-etched and patinated copper plates, with each plate being covered in Afro-futurist writing codecs as an homage to stolen languages, the artist says. A single Black figure etched onto a large copper plate sits at the center of the boat. Anonymous Black Man and Child; 1850, oil on canvas, 72 x 60"

Isadora and Mary Noe Freeman; 1861, oil on canvas, 64 x 50"

“The Arc of Return will serve as a stand-alone sculptural installation and a performance stage. The ritual durational performance ‘Re:Member,’ a multi-act ritual of washing, unbinding and ‘stitching’ black femme bodies between pasts, presents and futures, will be performed live during the exhibition,” Breeze adds.

The oil paintings in the exhibition feature poignant portraits such as Two African American Boys Facing Front, in which two young boys pose in the stiff manner characteristic of old photographs, as well as Anonymous Black Man and Child, depicting an elderly man and a young child in 1850.Anonymous African American Woman with Basket: 1856, oil on canvas, 72 x 60"

“The entire exhibition will be a living altar, a site of ritual honoring and healing, and an active point of reimagined futurity for Black and Indigenous bodies,” says Breeze. The exhibition will be on view at form & concept in Santa Fe, New Mexico, through June 15, moving to The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn this fall, before touring to NMSU Art Museum in Las Cruces, New Mexico, at the beginning of 2022. —

form & concept
435 S. Guadalupe Street, Floor 1
Santa Fe, NM 87501
(505) 780-8312 • www.formandconcept.center