Exhibition Guide
Four Sites of Return presents Nikesha Breeze’s continued research into personal, social, environmental and spiritual wound. Working from an Afrofuturist and Afrocentric lens, the artist creates ritual spaces and ancestral artifacts as an act of reclamation for Black, Indigenous, Queer and Earth bodies.
The titular sites—Ritual, Remembrance, Reparation and Reclamation—are embodied in the show through oil paintings, charcoal drawings, sculpture, site-specific installation and conceptual performance interventions. The sites communicate with and through each other to form a sacrosanct environment that is centered on the value, recognition, beauty and power of the Black body.
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Nikesha Breeze, Anonymous African American Man with Bandana; 1860, 2020.
Artist Statement
Nikesha BreezeI am an American-born descendant of the Mende People of Sierra Leone and first generation Assyrian immigrants from Iran. My work investigates the interrelationality and resilience of the Black and Queer body in relationship to power, vulnerability, the sacred and the ancestral. My work is deeply ritual and process-based, with a strong attention to detail, craft and materiality.
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Nikesha Breeze, Underground Railroad, 2018.
Curatorial Statement
Jordan EddyThe rowboat of Underground Railroad is the first in a fleet of vessels that glide—literally or metaphorically—through Nikesha Breeze’s visual artwork. There are slave ships, a steamboat and, of course, the copper-lined vessel that forms a sacred ceremonial space at this exhibition’s heart. These ships travel, once and again, to the titular sites: Ritual, Remembrance, Reclamation and Reparation. In a sense they transform the exhibition itself into a great vessel, one that exists in a space that is both liminal and central.
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The Sanctuary of Wound
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From the Curator
From its earliest iteration as a written proposal and series of sketches, The Sanctuary of Wound was a solar system of sorts. The Arc of Return and The Black Goddexx of Time form the gravitational center of this sacred space, orienting the Black body and experience at the luminous heart of the exhibition. As viewers, we are caught in the installation’s orbit but held apart from its core. From this peripheral vantage point, we hold the responsibility to reimagine pasts, presents and futures.
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From the Artist
The Arc of Return is a life-size wooden boat covered in hundreds of hand-etched and patinated copper plates. Each plate is inscribed with Afrofuturist writing codecs, spirit writing, prayers and sacred symbols of the diaspora. The boat is both a symbol of eternal return for African diasporic bodies and an active site of Black perpetuity. It cradles The Black Goddexx of Time, a hand-etched and patinated copper plate, and is encircled by The Sanctuary of Wound.
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Artwork
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Archival Portraiture
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From the Curator
In Archival Portraiture, Nikesha Breeze draws inspiration from rare archival photographs of often-unidentified Black Americans, bringing citizens of the past into a shared moment with the viewer. Every element of this installation, from the council-like arrangement of the paintings and drawings to the custom gold-and-velvet frames, is aimed at illuminating each subject’s sacred humanity and generating visceral moments of recognition and connection.
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From the Artist
In this work I am exploring the Black American image through the lens of the first recorded photographs of Black people in the United States. Drawing upon early daguerreotype, tintype and emulsion photos dating as far back as 1840, I am reclaiming the images, often of slaves, laborers, craftspeople and children, 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.
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Artwork
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Nikesha Breeze, Anonymous African American Man and Child; 1856, 2020
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Nikesha Breeze, Anonymous African American Woman with Basket; 1855, 2020
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Nikesha Breeze, Black Cane Carver, 2021
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Nikesha Breeze, Isadora and Mary Noe Freeman, 2020
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Nikesha Breeze, Two African American Boys Facing Front, 2020
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Nikesha Breeze, Anonymous African American Man with Bandana; 1860, 2020
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So Many Bones
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From the Artist
The Land Effigies serve as guardians of Black, Indigenous, Queer and Earth bodies. Each one is constructed and initiated as a site-specific installation utilizing local plants and earth medicines. The Land Effigy becomes a grounding force for the work in the exhibit, utilizing the spirits of each plant to create both a field of protection and a conduit for the various energies that arise in the space.
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Artwork
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Tree of Remembering
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"Slaves were branded according to the mark of the purchaser at the Tree of Forgetting. The name of the place, however, stems from the ritual of turning slaves around the tree to reinforce forgetfulness of their homes. Men were walked around the tree nine times, and women seven times." ~ “Visiting Ouidah,” The Ouidah Museum of History
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From the Artist
Here in this altar space, you are invited to share in communal prayer and ritual practice. The “tree of forgetting” sought to mystically cut our ancestors from their roots. To disappear the invisible cords to their origins. This tree serves as a place to mythically bind the spirit back to its source. It is a place of prayer, and of honoring all that has been lost. A place to give offerings towards all of our futures. To make reparations and to remember.
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Artwork
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Mutiny of Morning
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From a Scholar
"In Mutiny of Morning, Nikesha Breeze performs a kind of holy reclamation of 'Blackness' and 'darkness' by a tour de force of 'blackout' poetry—the blacking out of all but a few words on an existent page of literature. The resulting poems are sizzling purifications, violent restorations of integrity, spiritualizations of Black power and integrity, of pain, wound, bewilderment, rage, and, sometimes, luminous generosity." ~ Zhenevere Sophia Dao
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From the Artist
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, written in 1899, is a racist book. Conrad himself was a white man, a racist, a white supremacist and for all intents and purposes, a talented writer. Conrad, as artist, used his gift to both invisibilize and grossly misrepresent and dehumanize African people and their lands and customs.
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Artwork
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Nikesha Breeze, Mutiny of Morning (Pages 7-8), 2020
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Nikesha Breeze, Mutiny of Morning (Pages 13-14), 2020
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Nikesha Breeze, Mutiny of Morning (Pages 15-16), 2020
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Nikesha Breeze, Mutiny of Morning (Pages 23-24), 2020
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Nikesha Breeze, Mutiny of Morning (Pages 27-28), 2020
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Nikesha Breeze, Mutiny of Morning (Pages 29-30), 2020
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Nikesha Breeze, Mutiny of Morning (Pages 31-32), 2020
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Nikesha Breeze, Mutiny of Morning (Pages 33-34), 2020
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Nikesha Breeze, Mutiny of Morning (Pages 37-38), 2020
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108 Death Masks
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From the Curator.
108 Death Masks has toured venues across the nation, most notably as a top honoree at ArtPrize in Michigan, but this is the first time it has appeared as Nikesha Breeze originally intended: in a single, unbroken line. The grand sweep of the installation echoes the artist’s scholarly and sculptural delvings into their own ancestry, and the broader currents of Black experience and history that they tapped into as a result of that process.
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From the Artist
108 Death Masks is a large-scale ceramic installation centered on the living experience of shared wound. I created 108 life-sized, hand-carved ceramic Death Masks as a ritual prayer for my lost and unknown ancestors. 108 is understood as a sacred number of endlessness and prayer. The number was used in this work to represent the endlessness of suffering in communities of color due to systematic racial violence, oppression and white supremacy. Simultaneously, it represents the endless capacity of prayer and conscious care to move backwards and forwards in time.
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Stages of Tectonic Blackness
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From the Artist
Stages of Tectonic Blackness is an eight-hour durational performance and ritualized, elongated mourning dance for Black bodies and Earth bodies. In a cultural moment racked with urgency, Stages of Tectonic Blackness invites us to move slowly in order to feel more deeply into this time. As a durational practice of Black queer resistance, this work prioritizes Black experience, Black time, Black bodies and our racialized relationship to the earth.
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This project is a collaboration between Miles Tokunow, Nikesha Breeze and Lazarus Nance Letcher. It was produced by GROUND SERIES, with cinematography by Mk and editing by Nikesha Breeze. The questions above were inspired by the work of Kathryn Yusoff, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.
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Hand Tools of Resilience
Concurrent Exhibition -
About the Show
Hand Tools of Resilience is an international juried exhibition that appears throughout Nikesha Breeze’s Four Sites of Return. The project invited African diasporic and Indigenous artists to examine the conscious and unconscious tools that Black and Indigenous people have created to survive, thrive and build within oppressive and abusive systems. Artists from across the world conceptualized new tools with Afrofuturistic functionalities. They are tools that might extinguish gaslighting or passive racist treatment, or shields that represent covert and overt armor and talismans. They are wedges for loosening systems of supremacy and abuse, or chisels for shaping new Black and Indigenous realities.
Convened by Nikesha Breeze, the Hand Tools of Resilience jury included Rose B. Simpson, Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, Le’Andra LeSeur and Isra Rene. Visit handtoolsofresilience.com for more information.
Explore the exhibition.