Nikesha Breeze is an international artist working across a diverse range of media—including oil painting, clay and bronze sculpture, installation, performance art, and film. Grounded in a global African diasporic and Afro-Futurist perspective, her layered, immersive works draw on African diasporic research, reclamation, and memorial, forging otherworldly spaces rich with storytelling and historical education. Her practice employs multiple materials and methodologies that call upon ancestral memory and archival resurrection to revive stories long erased from the global narrative, engaging directly with themes of grief, sanctuary, power and presence, visibility, and erasure.
Breeze’s innovative approach has garnered national acclaim. In 2021, her expansive 5,000-square-foot solo exhibition “Four Sites Of Return” was featured in American Art Collector, Hyperallergic, Metalsmith Magazine, and The New York Times. Her collaborative work, “Stages of Tectonic Blackness,” earned her the National Performance Network Creative Fund and Development Fund Grant. Earlier, at the 2018 International ARTPRIZE exhibition, she received the juried 3D Grand Prize Award and the Contemporary Black Arts Award for her sculptural installation, 108 Death Masks: A Communal Prayer for Peace and Justice—a work that in 2024 was included in the permanent collection of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama, honoring the six million lives lost in enslavement in the United States.
Originally from Portland, Oregon, Nikesha Breeze now lives and works in the high desert of Taos, New Mexico, on the unceded land of the Taos Pueblo People. As an African American descendant of the Mende People of Sierra Leone and Assyrian American immigrants from Iran, her multicultural heritage infuses her work with a dynamic range of perspectives. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as MoCADA Museum, The Albuquerque Museum, University Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and the NkinKyim Museum of Ghana, as well as at fine art galleries and art fairs around the globe.
Artist Statment
My work is invested in reclaiming both the historical narratives of the African diasporic body and the possibilities of Afro-futurity. I approach this through a deliberately interdisciplinary practice that spans painting, sculpture, performance, installation, writing, and film. As a painter, I employ large-scale, monochromatic realism to engage archival images of the Black subject across time. Life-size figures emerge against surfaces that are textured, fractured, and weathered, evoking both the persistence of history and the materiality of memory.
As a ceramicist and sculptor, I work with clay and natural materials to excavate ancestral and ecological memory. These works reconstruct stories and bodies rendered invisible within dominant historical frameworks, offering them renewed presence and form. My performance practice positions the body as both subject and medium. Through durational actions, mourning rituals, and spatial interventions, I enact processes of reclamation and sovereignty that are inseparable from diasporic embodiment and transformation.
In installation, I construct immersive environments designed as sites of collective engagement. These spaces invite participation in acts of ritual, care, accountability, and critical witnessing, situating the public body within networks of relation and responsibility. As a writer, poet, and filmmaker, I interrogate the power of language and narrative as sites of colonial control and post-colonial possibility. My work reconfigures Western linguistic structures while generating new codes of diasporic syntax, mapping, and meaning-making.
Taken together, these practices constitute a living archive of Black memory, presence, and futurity. They aim to both honor the past and articulate speculative possibilities, positioning art as a site of resistance, repair, and re-imagination.