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The power of image: Nikesha Breeze explores her ancestry through portraiture and sculpture
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Editor’s note: The Journal continues the once-a-month series “From the Studio” with Assistant Arts Editor Kathaleen Roberts, as she takes an up-close look at an artist.
In the antebellum South, it was common practice to stuff chairs with the hair of the enslaved.
Taos artist Nikesha Breeze explores that custom, as well as archival portraiture of African Americans, in her exhibit “Black Archive” at Albuquerque’s Richard Levy Gallery.
The theme of restoration percolates throughout the show.
After growing up in Portland, Oregon, Breeze moved to Taos in 1999. It was there that she became deeply invested in researching her racial ancestry. She took DNA tests showing she was an African American descendant of the Mende people of Sierra Leone and Assyrian American immigrants from Iran.
“All this ancestor work started to fill me,” she said.
She dove deeply in to African American history and started painting old doors in her living room.
”I never expected to be an artist,” she said. “I traced my body on the doors to see if I could get the shape. I didn’t show them to anybody.”
She began attending the University of New Mexico-Taos, thinking she would study medicine. She took a few art classes.
“I took a mixed-media class; the teacher was great,” Breeze said. “She saw one of my paintings of the doors and sent photographs of them to the Harwood (Museum of Art). They invited me to show my work.
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“I was the first African American person to have a solo show at the Harwood.”
A Connecticut couple bought all six paintings, giving Breeze enough money to live on to take a year off. She began sculpting death masks as a way to honor the spirits of her ancestors. A win in the Michigan ArtPrize made the national news and in 2022 the Equal Justice Initiative asked her to recreate the masks for installation at the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama.
Fueled by success and her own investigations, Breeze began the series Archival Portraiture and W.E.B. DuBois Portraits exploring the history of the Black image in America.
“He took hundreds of portraits and created multiple documents for the 1910 World’s Fair in Paris,” Breeze said. “He was cataloging the middle class, which was shocking.”
Much of her inspiration came from Frederick Douglass, the American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer and statesman.
“They had never seen a Black man in a suit.”
“He talked a lot about the power of the image,” Breeze said. “He wrote a treatise on it. (The abolitionist) Sojourner Truth commissioned photographs (of herself) to fund her speaking.”
Breeze painted her images in oil after scouring the photographic archives of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian.
Sadly, many of the sitters were unidentified. One dignified woman sits holding a basket in her lap.
“She is obviously a powerful and formidable woman,” Breeze said. “It begs the question, ‘Who is she?’
“All of them are a little different, but we don’t know their story.”
Breeze’s idea for the chairs first surfaced when she discovered an antique pair in the Taos Habitat for Humanity’s trash. When she returned later, they had disappeared, so she decided to recreate them, upholstering them in silk jacquard.
“The chair itself is stuffed with raw cotton and African American hair,” Breeze said.
She painted a pair of Black women with full hair on the backs.
“In most places, they were required by law to be hidden,” Breeze said. “The hair was considered ugly by the antebellum women.”
For 20 years, Breeze worked as a member of Wise Fool New Mexico, and danced and appeared in small independent films.
“I was a model at 8 years old,” she said. “I was in thousands of print ads throughout the Pacific Northwest.
She moved to Taos in her early 20s in 1999.
“I was searching for the place I wanted to be in this world,” she said. “I fell in love with Taos.”
It must have been providence. As she researched her ancestry, she learned her family on her father’s side were founders of Blackdom, the most important Black homestead colony in New Mexico, located south of Roswell.
New Mexico Women in the Arts recently selected Breeze as one of five “Women to Watch” in 2024. The five will be showing their work at 516 Arts in June.
