Nikesha Breeze– Four Sites of Return:
Ritual, Remembrance, Reparation & Reclamation
University Art Museum, Contemporary Gallery and Bunny Conlon Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery
January 21-March 5, 2022
Opening Reception: Friday, January 21, 2022, 5:30-7:30PM
Four Sites of Return- Ritual, Remembrance, Reparation & Reclamation, includes new and existing works by artist Nikesha Breeze that surface the collective traumas, histories, rituals, and healing of the African Diaspora in the Southwest. Through site-specific installation, sculpture, paintings, film and live performance, Breeze seamlessly weaves African Diasporic histories, Afrofuturism and their own ancestral connection to Blackdom, NM, the state’s first all-Black community. This exhibition opens on January 21st, 2022 at the University Art Museum (UAM) at New Mexico State University (NMSU) in the Contemporary Gallery and Bunny Conlon Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery and will remain on view until March 5th, 2022.
Within Four Sites of Return, a new iteration of the project Stages of Tectonic Blackness will be presented. Stages of Tectonic Blackness is an ongoing series of durational performances and ritualized, elongated mourning rites choreographed and orchestrated by performers Nikesha Breeze, Miles Tokunow, Lazarus Nance Letcher, and cinematographer, MK. Stages of Tectonic Blackness: Blackdom, was physically performed in November, 2021 and is conceptually centered in the early 20th century Black freedom town called Blackdom. The UAM will present a two-channel film of the performance, as well as mixed-media objects and a kiosk playing interviews from descendants of Blackdom.
Join us for the opening reception of these two exhibitions including a special performance of Stages of Tectonic Blackness in the University Art Museum on Friday, January 21, 2022. The public reception begins at 5:30 PM and the performance is scheduled to begin at 6:30 PM.
Read full press release here
Learn more about programming
Press image: Nikesha Breeze and Miles Tokunow; Stages of Tectonic Blackness: Blackdom (Still from performance), 2021. Photo credit: ©Monica Kennedy.
Remembered Landscapes: The Sacred Space of Home
Works by Jackie Mitchell Edwards
University Art Museum, Mullennix Bridge Gallery
January 21-March 5, 2022
Opening Reception: Friday, January 21, 2022, 5:30-7:30PM
Remembered Landscapes: The Sacred Space of Home, an exhibition in the Mullennix Bridge Gallery at the University Art Museum (UAM) at New Mexico State University (NMSU), will open on January 21st, 2022 and will remain on view until March 5th, 2022. This multimedia installation by artist Jackie Mitchell Edwards reveals an elongated poetic search for home and healing through material and spiritual relationships with nature and landscape.
This new body of work by Mitchell Edwards was inspired by artist Nikesha Breeze’s 2020 call for BIPOC artists to create Hand Tools of Resilience. Hand Tools of Resilience, an international juried exhibition, invited artists to examine the conscious and unconscious tools that Black, Indigenous and People of Color have created to survive, thrive and build within oppressive and abusive systems. Breeze’s call sparked a deeper and focused research on the power of ritual objects within Mitchell Edwards’s greater practice and the results are witnessed in this powerful installation. Mitchell Edwards’s own journey as a Black woman in the African Diaspora (a term that refers to the descendants of Africans shipped to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade) focuses on the primacy of the study of nature and other spiritual traditions. Mitchell Edwards, like Breeze, uses ritual and remembrance when creating talismanic healing objects that protect and guide one’s way back to their ancestral home.
Press image: Jackie Mitchell Edwards ,Ritual Object for Action, 2021, Root/Branch of a desert bush, Rutile, quartz with iron inclusions, Length: 10 in, Courtesy of Artist. Photo credit: Form & Concept / Byron Flesher.
More information regarding upcoming 2020-2021 exhibitions coming soon.
