Gallery Grand Opening
Featuring Jacob Lawrence and Nikesha Breeze
November 3, 2023 - January 31, 2024
BLAC; 15 East Pennington; Tucson, AZ 85701
To view this show virtually please visit this link.
"We are thrilled to be able to showcase the art and talent of these two groundbreaking artists," said Laura Pendleton Miller, founder of the Blue Lotus Artists' Collective. "Their work is truly inspiring, and we hope that visitors to the gallery will be inspired by their creativity, vision and moving portrayal of black history and culture. The exhibition will provide a unique opportunity for visitors to engage with the art and ideas of these dynamic artists.”
About the Artists:
NIKESHA BREEZE B.1979 USA
Working from a Global African Diasporic, Afro-Centric and Afro-Futurist perspective, Nikesha Breeze’s interdisciplinary work reimagines inter-generational traumatic inheritance through the intersection of art and ritual. Nikesha’s work centers Black, Brown, Indigenous, Queer and Earth bodies existing within realms of past, present, and future. Nikesha uses performance art, film, painting, textiles, sculpture, and site-specific engagement to create otherworldly spaces centered on African Diasporic reclamation and honoring. Nikesha’s methodologies call upon ancestral memory and archival resurrection to bring forward the faces, bodies, stories, and spirits that have been systematically erased from the master narrative. Their performance art and film work reimagines relationships with the body, the invisible world, and the social space. Originally from Portland, Oregon Nikesha Breeze lives and works in the high desert of Taos, New Mexico, on the unceded land of the Taos Pueblo People. Nikesha is an African American descendant of the Mende People of Sierra Leone, and Assyrian American Immigrants from Iran. Nikesha has shown work both nationally and internationally, featured in the MOCADA Museum of Contemporary African Diasora Arts Brooklyn, The Albuquerque Museum, University Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, NkinKyim Museum of Ghana, and various galleries and art fairs across the globe. In 2021 Nikesha’s, 5000 sg ft solo exhibition FOUR SITES OF RETURN, gained national acclaim and was featured in American Art Collector, Hyperallergic, Metalsmith Magazine and the NY times. Nikesha was awarded National recognition at the 2018 International ARTPRIZE exhibition, winning the juried 3D Grand Prize Award as well as the Contemporary Black Arts Award, for their Sculptural installation: 108 Death Masks: A communal Prayer for Peace and Justice. 2021 was National Performance Network Creative Fund and Development Fund Grant Recipient for their collaborative work , Stages of Tectonic Blackness. In 2023 Nikesha’s work will enter the permanent collection and National archive with a large-scale public installation within the EJI Legacy Museum in Alabama.
“My work is deeply invested in reclaiming both historical narratives of the African diasporic body and the reclaiming of Afro-futures. I work through multiple mediums and interdisciplinary practices. As a large scale oil painter, my work deals with archival imagery of the Black subject through time. Through my methodologies I play with historical tension and the palpable spirits of resilience. As a ceramicist and sculptor I work with clay and natural materials to draw from ancestral memory, and earth memory, I sculpt bodies and stories that have been invisibilized within our master narrative and give them voice and form. As a performance artist, I use my own body to press and shape itself into the living memory of the diaspora. I allow time to work through me as a medium, enacting durational mourning rituals and radical reclamations of space. I work in a performative body as an act of Black sovereignty and continued transformational power. As an installation artist, I build large scale immersive environments of sacred space. I support engagement of the public body, drawing people into ritual acts of care, of prayer, of witnessing, as a form of critical accountability. As a writer, poet, and filmmaker I seek the recapitulation of language and narrative as a tool of post-colonial reclamation.
JACOB LAWRENCE 1917-2000
Jacob Lawrence was an African-American artist known for combining color, shape, history and sociology in order to create emotionally powerful images. The son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, Lawrence was born in 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. As a teenager, Lawrence moved with his mother to Harlem, where she held a full-time job. Concerned for her child’s welfare, Lawrence’s mother enrolled her son in an after-school center for children, Utopia House, where Lawrence attended a painting class. “They didn’t tell me what to do, how to draw, or what to paint,” Lawrence remembered. “They gave me materials and ideas on how to experiment, and left me alone to create out of my imagination.” At the age of fifteen, Lawrence attended the College Art Association classes held at the Harlem Art Workshop, where he studied with noted painter Charles Alston. Showing great promise, Lawrence continued with painter and sculptor Henry Bannarn through the Works Progress Administration. For eighteen months, Lawrence participated in the WPA Federal Arts Project.
Lawrence quickly developed a bold, unique style, which he applied to seldom-treated subjects from black history and contemporary life in Harlem. In 1941, at the age of 24, Lawrence received almost overnight acclaim with the exhibition of his Migration of the Negro series at New York's prestigious Downtown Gallery. Lawrence became the first African-American artist to be represented by a New York gallery. That same month, Fortune magazine reproduced twenty-six of the series' sixty panels, in color, accompanied by a lengthy article. It was also in 1941 that Jacob Lawrence created the Legend of John Brown series, begun in New Orleans during the artist’s honeymoon.
The Legend of John Brown series is based on the life of the abolitionist John Brown (1800-1859). Brown was the son of deeply religious, Calvinist parents who taught their children that slavery was a sin against God. One of the most famous abolitionists, Brown is best known for leading the ill-fated attack on the United States Armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). His exploits were extolled by numerous artists and writers, all of whom contributed to the making of the John Brown legend. Lawrence's series is widely considered one of the most powerful depictions of the abolitionist's life. Lawrence looked at John Brown’s story in the context of the African-American struggle for equal rights during his own time. The images reflect Lawrence’s dramatic narrative abilities through an economy of means, with large, flat forms, pure colors, and an extreme reduction of detail.
Like other American Scene painters, Lawrence was placed on the defensive by the Abstract Expressionist wave that swept through New York in the 1950s. He believed in figurative art with liberal, humanistic meaning. He told an audience of artists and art students at the time: “Maybe...humanity to you has been reduced to the sterility of the line, the cube, the circle and the square, devoid of all feeling, cold and highly esoteric. If this is so, I can well understand why you cannot portray the true America. It is because you have lost all feeling for man...And your work shall remain without depth for as long as you can only see and respect the beauty of the cube, and not see and respect the beauty of man—every man.”
Lawrence’s powerful style can be attributed to his growing knowledge of modern art. He was strongly influenced by Josef Albers, with whom he worked at the Black Mountain College of Art in 1946. He was also influenced by Picasso's Synthetic Cubist paintings and Ernst Kirchner's Expressionism, with its angular, brittle shapes and sharp contrast of predominantly cool colors. His close contact with fellow artists Ben Shahn and Stuart Davis, at Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery, did much to build his confidence and broaden his aesthetic outlook. Two extended trips to Nigeria in the early 1960s and the events of the Civil Rights Movement brought a new social awareness to Lawrence's artwork. He became a professor of art at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where he lived and worked until his death on June 9th, 2000 at the age of 82. Lawrence's work has always been dominated by his concern for social issues and historical events, particularly as they involve African-Americans. Richard J. Powell, in his book Jacob Lawrence, wrote "Jacob Lawrence has turned stoops, staircases, ladders, and other vehicles for ascension into artistic remonstrations on survival. That all of this has been brought about by an artist who has been closely attuned to the pulse, mind, and historical edge of Afro-America should challenge us to delve even further into Jacob Lawrence's genius."
