Brave 'New Worlds': 516 Arts exhibit showcases 'New Mexico Women to Watch'

When women artists envision a new world, they may touch on issues of racism, ancestry, the landscape, justice, ambiguity and more.

516 Arts is showcasing “New Worlds: New Mexico Women to Watch 2024” with works by five New Mexico women: Nikesha Breeze, Szu-Han Ho, Eliza Naranjo Morse, Jennifer Nehrbass and Rose B. Simpson.

Brave 'New Worlds': 516 Arts exhibit showcases 'New Mexico Women to Watch'

The exhibit gestated in Washington, D.C., at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, where local curator Nancy Zastudil served as the consulting curator from New Mexico. The NMWA chose Naranjo Morse for the Washington exhibit.

516 Arts is presenting all five nominees in a ripple of responses to questions posed by the NMWA: When women artists envision a different world, how does that look? How have our societal conditions impacted artists’ visions for the future or inspired them to create alternative realities?

Nikesha Breeze works from a Global African Diasporic, Afro-Centric and Afro-Futurist lens.

Breeze’s work “Mutiny of Morning” was appropriated from Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness.” Breeze applied blackout poetry to racist portions of the text, Zastudil said.

“Nikesha describes it as a natural, surgical and unapologetic appropriation of that text,” Zastudil said.

Breeze’s work reimagines the possibility of healing intergenerational traumatic inheritance through the intersection of art and ritual. She centers Black bodies as simultaneously existing within realms of past, present and future.

The show also features three of her copper etchings.

“There’s a lot of Afro-Futurist style in her work,” Zastudil said. “It’s looking back to look forward.”

Albuquerque painter Jennifer Nehrbass works with the figure and the landscape while lifting imagery from online to create visual collages.

“She is looking at our relationship to the landscape and the body,” Zastudil said. “Everything on social media seems very idealized, and she plays off that.”

Santa Clara Pueblo mixed-media artist Naranjo Morse created “Light from Love,” “tapping into this theme of what’s next,” Zastudil said. “The spirit of her work is so informed by her Indigeneity and ancestral themes.”

The piece shows mystical beings carrying backpacks and belongings as colorful birds fly overhead.

“It was recently used for a book about Indigenous research design,” Zastudil added.

Albuquerque performance artist Szu-Han Ho’s work explores the relationship between bodies and sites of memory, often addressing the migrant justice movement and her family history in Taiwan.

Ho created a multi-functional garment designed to be used at protests. Sometimes, it unfolds to become a banner.

“It’s really a sign of resistance,” Zastudil said.

Simpson is a mixed-media artist from Santa Clara Pueblo who uses ceramics, metals, fashion, performance, music, installation, writing and customized cars in her work.

“My life-work is a seeking out of tools to use to heal the damages I have experienced as a human being of our post-modern and post-colonial era — objectification, stereotyping and the disempowering detachment of our creative selves through the ease of modern technology,” she wrote in an artist’s statement.

“Gamer” is a sculptural ceramic piece.

“She’s translating her life processes and experiences into these physical beings,” Zastudil said.

A selection of programming has been scheduled for the exhibit, with Breeze giving a live reading of “Mutiny of Morning” at 6 p.m. Aug. 8.