When Legacy Gets Personal: Art, Archives, And Ancestral Truth - Nikesha Breeze (S2:E19)

A chance connection at Yale cracks open a hidden family history and turns legacy into something immediate, unsettling, and real. We talk with interdisciplinary artist Nikesha Breeze about building monuments, reclaiming erased stories, and using grief rituals to transform what history leaves in our bodies. 

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Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

Transcript

Big Questions About Creativity

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Have you ever wondered what makes creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? Is their life really as much fun as it looks from the outside? Hello, I'm your host, Lily Pierpont, and this is Artstorming, a podcast about how ideas become paintings or poems, performances, or collections. Each episode, I'll chat with a guest from the arts community and we'll explore how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new. In our inaugural season, Artstorming the City Different, we dipped our toes into the vast ocean of creativity with a focus on some of our favorite creators of Santa Fe, New Mexico. That conversation was enjoyed by artists and non-artists alike because it showed us how we can all benefit from learning how to generate something from nothing, dream bigger, charter new territories, and solve problems in new ways. In season two, we're going to take that concept of generating our lives with intention to the next level. This season, we're talking about legacy, art as legacy, and how the most creative among us

Season Two: Legacy And Remembrance

SPEAKER_00 1:12

tackle this rich and deeply personal subject. Welcome to Artstorming, The Art of Remembrance. So, welcome back. Now I've recorded over 50 episodes or so to date, and I always learn something new as I allow the conversation to take us where it will, exploring stories from the past and

A Yale Coincidence Turns Jarring

SPEAKER_00 1:34

present. But today the universe decided to collapse that space between past and present right in front of my eyes. My guest today is the extraordinary Nikesha Brees, a New Mexico-based, internationally acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist whose work centers on remembrance, reclamation, and ancestral healing. When we recorded this, Nikesha was at Yale University working on a monument dedicated to the enslaved people who built the college. In the first three minutes of our taping, I shared that one of my ancestors was a founder of Yale. Only for Nikesha to gently and matter-of-factly reveal that they were currently building a monument to the very individuals my family had enslaved. To say that I was taken aback is an understatement. This was a piece of history that I did not know about my family. Though I suppose if I'd given it deeper thought, considering the era and the station of my family, it should not have been such a surprise. But I had always understood that my Pierpont ancestors were abolitionists, and eventually they were, but that didn't erase the earlier truth that was revealed in that moment. Nevertheless, it was a beautiful, albeit jarring, and deeply humbling moment that set the stage for one of the most profound conversations I've ever had on this show. Today, Nikacia takes us on a journey from the historic Black Freedom Town of Lacdam, New Mexico, which I had never heard of, to the halls of Yale and all the way to the Sydney Biennale, where she recently constructed a massive 6,500 square foot immersive installation centered around a 65-foot tree made of cotton and the voices of formerly enslaved ancestors. We also talk about the grief fests that she leads with the Unashe Grief Sanctuary, how we can collectively metabolize social shame and planetary loss, and what it means to step away from a sanitized culture of death to reclaim the sacred rituals of care. This is an episode about finding out who we are, honoring where we come from, and learning how to digest the heavy truths of our history so that we can transform them into art. Here is my conversation with Nikesha Brees.

Building A Monument To Enslaved Builders

SPEAKER_00 4:01

So I'm art storming with Nikesha Brees, and you are a resident of New Mexico, but you're currently in New Haven on your way between your visits to Sydney for the Biennale. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Yeah, I live in New Mexico. I've lived there for 26 years. So it's home home. And yeah, I'm currently actually working at Yale University on a multi-year project with the college building and designing and doing research around their history of enslavement. So I'm building a monument to the people who built Yale College, basically. And so I'm here doing that in one of my yeah, journeys. And then I'm going to Sydney, Australia for just a week to close down the show at the B and Alley.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Wow. So one of my ancestors is one of the founders of Yale University. So that's an interesting coincidence. Pierpont. Pierpont was his name.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Oh, yeah, actually. So part of the work I'm doing is installing work at the Pierpont house and acknowledging the individuals that were enslaved by the Pierpont family, some of which were the original builders of the college. So the Pierpont family enslaved the Luke family. Roos and Jethro Luke were enslaved, and their children were enslaved by the Pierponts. And they were the main builders of Connecticut Hall, which is the central first building of Yale College. They're brick masons and built the college. And so part of my main monument actually is to the Luke's.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

That is incredible. And a piece of the Pierpont history that I did not know. And as we have been exploring in this podcast, so much of the history of our culture and our overlaps isn't documented. And I think you've done a great deal of investigation into your history and your lineage and have come to learn and reveal and expose for us a lot of the untold stories. And that's one of the reasons I was so excited to be talking to you today and so excited about just finding all of the crossovers that exist between the work that you're doing and what I'm trying to do with this podcast, which is to really revisit how we engage with the art of remembrance, how we live in our legacies, how we interrupt toxic legacies, and how we explore the nature of how we live now based on understanding of our lineage and the legacies that we intend to leave behind. So it's the perfect intersection for us. So sort of a little bit jarring for me to learn because there's never been any discussion in any of my family about enslaved people within the Pierpont family. So I'm a little rattled by that, frankly.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

Oh yeah. There was quite a number of enslaved people through the Pierpont family. And the Pierponts also inherited a plantation in the South that they were receiving the money from and basically ran remotely. If you could do that back in the 1700s, but they did. And so there's quite an incredible history. I've been here for the last year. I came here in September, been here six, six months on and off over this last year, working at the Beinekee Library here at Yale, and the researchers there. And I'm a part of the Care Committee, which is the Committee for Art Recognizing Enslavement at Yale, and the Yale and Slavery Research Project, which is this multi-year project to uncover these histories. So part of that has been going through all of the founders of Yale, eight of the 10 of which were enslavers and researching their history and really pulling out from that the individuals that we want to continue to acknowledge. The project has unveiled over 200 named enslaved people that were enslaved by Yale at Yale College. So yeah, it's a very rich, very deep history spanning from the 1630s into till now. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

Wow. Well, when you get back to New Mexico, I'd love to just have a separate conversation with you about just that. I found the Pierponts. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. That is pretty shocking and amazing for me to be learning right in this moment. So I'm curious, is the exhibition that you're doing, the project that you're doing at Yale, related to what you're doing out here for the Richard Levy Gallery, or are they completely separate projects?

SPEAKER_01 8:18

So yeah, Richard Levy, they produced a limited edition of one of my 108 death masks, as well as a one of the prints for of my archival portraiture series. So their show is a beautiful opening of editions in their collection, including my work. So, but the yeah, the 108 Death Masks is a large project. It's a permanent national monument in Montgomery, Alabama that I completed in 2024. And that's there. But my work as a whole, across all of the different projects that I'm doing, is centered on remembrance, reclamation, building into the kind of fabric, like you say, of legacy, what that looks like, and how we build legacy based on how we understand our past. And so there's so

Lineage Across Assyrian And Black Roots

SPEAKER_01 9:05

much, yeah, every project that I do is connected in that way.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

And some of what I heard an interview that you did a podcast while you were in Australia, and you talked a little bit about your heritage on both sides. So your heritage on your father's side was African American, and then your mother has a Syrian background and she was from Iran.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

Yeah, my mom's side of the family is from Iran. We're Assyrian, not Syrian, but Assyrian. And my mom was first generation born here in the state. She was born in New York. Yeah, we have I have a Syrian family on my mom's side, and then my dad is African-American, and our family were enslaved here in this country. You know, the first record we have was from a plantation in the 1860s in North Carolina. So, however long before then, generations of enslavement, my family then were freed in North Carolina and moved the line through my father was to Texas and then eventually into New Mexico. And then my dad, I was born in Oregon, was born in Portland, Oregon. So part of the tree ended up moving up to the Northwest.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

And I understand from that podcast that when you moved to New Mexico, you didn't realize that a

New Mexico’s Lost Black Freedom Town

SPEAKER_00 10:15

branch of your family had settled in New Mexico back in the late 19th century.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Yeah, 1890s, 1900, my my family were some of the first families that settled um Blackdale, New Mexico, which is outside of Roswell, no longer there. It existed into the 1920s, but the legacy is still there. A lot of the folks that were there, over 300 families owned collectively 12,000 acres outside of Roswell. They all ended up having their lands for various reasons taken, sold, etc. And they've been in Roswell and Artesia and around the southwestern area.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

Well, and another really interesting uncovering because I when we talk about the cultural diversity of New Mexico, we often talk about the Hispanic and the native and the Anglo cultures coming together, but there's very little part of the story of the of Black history here. And so that's another really important dimension that you're bringing to this conversation.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Yeah, I think that's the thing, is that there is phenomenally beautiful and lost and yeah, not really shared or talked about. I would erase potentially histories of black diasporic life all throughout the country. There's so many freedom towns that were created that have disappeared since. There's just phenomenal histories here. And so that is important for me. Bringing that, of course, yeah, New Mexico, it is not often talked about. I I founded with two friends of mine in 2020. We founded a nonprofit in New Mexico called Earth Seed Black Arts Alliance, that is a nonprofit that's based on really breaking that myth of the tricultural state and bringing more awareness to black arts, black community, black culture, and how that shows up throughout New Mexico. And, you know, we've done a lot of different events and community gathering and shows. Yeah, it's incredible. When you start to open up into the reality of the diversity that does exist.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

I appreciate so much that you're doing that and celebrating it. And what a, again, a beautiful legacy to leave for us. And you're doing so many projects that have the potential to open up and reveal so many different aspects of this conversation. And one that I again learned about in your recent podcast was the conversation that you started with your on your mother's side of the family. So speak to that a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

You know, there's such incredible richness in my Assyrian lineage. There's so many, it's just stories, again, of yeah, cultural heritage and inheritance. My family were grape farmers and they had whole orchards of other trees and fruits and things like that here in the States. I started doing a weekly call with my mom, which was really wonderful before she passed. We did it consistently for, gosh, almost eight years. Every week we would talk amongst ourselves as a family and learn my mom's stories, stories of her growing up and her life as a young girl on the farm, and the dances that the family would do and wedding dances. And you know, it's just yeah, beautiful to learn our history.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

I just I really love that because again, one of the projects that we're doing, and the reason that for this podcast and the adjacent programs that we have is to give people ideas for how they can have deeper conversations with their family to learn about these things so that we don't have these siloed experiences and we don't discover our lineage and our legacies in archives of the bowels of American institutions or wherever they show up. So I I love that you've interrupted this idea that people's legacies just sort of drift away because the challenging and difficult conversations weren't had.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

Yeah, no, it's a bit it's it is really a huge blessing to have the opportunities to get to gather that information. Me and my brothers and sisters, we still meet just to share amongst ourselves. You know, we recorded every one of these meetings online through Zoom, and it's just our weekly call, family call. And wherever you are in the world, you could try to tune in for Family Call if you're there. And at least one of us would be there. At least my mom would be there. Usually I started it and I would always try to be there because I was managing it. But the yeah, it's very, very useful and just an enriching way to share and be in real lifetime with our stories.

Family Calls And Keeping Stories Alive

unknown 14:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:38

And so say a little bit about the installation that you have right now in Sydney, because I I recall there's a tree, and when you were talking about your mom growing up in the orchards, I'm wondering, even though that speaks to more of the African diaspora, is it is that tree, of course, tree is something that could be universal, but does that tree that exists in that exhibit have anything to do with your mom's relationship with her trees?

SPEAKER_01 15:03

No, not directly. I mean, the installation in Sydney, I think it anything it connects more to this relationship of collecting of oral histories. So that entire installation is based on over 10 years of research that I've done into the Library of Congress's archives and their collection of oral histories of formerly enslaved African-American people. There's a particular collection from the WPA from the 1930s, where they collected over 2,300 first-hand oral stories from folks that were between 70 and some 121 years old. And they were all born in enslavement. So some of them were children and some of them grew to relative adulthood before emancipation. And the these recordings or their written interviews are the only records, only firsthand, first-person primary counts of that experience for people. There are countless books about it, but from the mouths of people who lived it, it's really different. And the whole collection was digitized like around 2015, so not too long ago, actually. And being that there's so many, most people haven't read them. It's really a phenomenal treasure trove of information, not only information about these individuals' lives, but around the culture, the traditions, the medicines, the prayer practices, the superstitions, folk stories, songs, rich relationships of information that were sometimes these stories. This was the only time one of these elders shared their story so openly and so freely. Because a lot of times those elders wouldn't talk about it, the hard times within their families. Because, like you said, some things you just don't want to talk about like that. But a stranger coming in and doing these interviews would sometimes open up spaces for the stories to be told that couldn't be told elsewhere. And so it becomes a phenomenal record. And there's also contention, a lot of the interviewers were white folks, so there's that too, where the stories could have definitely shifted to sometimes sound better than they might have been, or, you know, um things held back. I mean, there's a lot of sifting through questions, even the leading of the interviewers, all of it. That's to say this record became the foundation for the work. And so the work is a s over 6,000 square foot massive uh installation in a power station where I filled the whole power station with these stories. So it's a sound installation, there's speakers embedded throughout with live actors reading and reanimating the stories. There's an 1850s cabin rebuilt to the specs from the stories, including materials from the archive, foodstuffs, medicine stuffs, all of the beds, the furniture was made based on the archival histories. In the stories, they repeat again and again that they would return to the trees. They would go to the trees to pray. They go to the trees for church, and they go to the trees for sanctuary. And so the center of the whole installation is this sort of mystical tree of sanctuary based on a baobab tree, which is what West African tree as well as an Australian tree. But one of the first and oldest trees on the planet. And like before enslavement, it was used and still is used as a gathering place of for church. So carrying memory

Sydney Biennale: Cotton Tree And Voices

SPEAKER_01 18:24

through timelines, the 65-foot-tall Baobab tree grows out of the center, made out of cotton. So the entire thing is made out of over 2,000 yards of cotton, which was the amount of cotton that was harvested in a day or two days with one enslaved worker. And so the material, the spirit, all of that is woven in through the archive.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Well, it sounds like something that certainly took a great uh deal of effort to put together. What happens to this installation? And did you create this installation for the space? Did you know the space that you were going to be building into, or was it an iteration of something that you had explored before?

SPEAKER_01 19:01

So I've been dreaming the work up, as I said, for a very long time. And I I imagined it in a lot of different ways. How it looked, the trees, all of that were sort of in the dream space. And I drew pictures of it before I found this site, or before I was approached by the Sydney Biennale. They offered the space because I saw I needed a huge space. They're like, how's this one? And so uh it was a year's worth of work once I was given the site plan to then design my idea into that space. So it is a site-specific installation for the Biennale, which means that work will come down and be sort of repurposed. The materials will be shifted and moved to different things and stay in Australia. But the work itself is a site-specific work that can be developed in another site, in other sites, because the actual work is the archive, is the information material. It's all ultimately quite ephemeral. The moving space of it was just, I say it's just wooden fabric. Like there were pieces of wood for the cabin and the fabric, but what made it alive were the stories and the vision and the concept and that travels.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

Wouldn't it be amazing to have it at the Smithsonian as a permanent installation?

SPEAKER_01 20:15

Well, yeah. And yeah, as a permanent or just definitely institutions, like being able to bring this work into institutional spaces. I am currently sort of redesigning a way to be able to easily travel the work to various institutions so that it could be there for temporary and potentially permanent installations. But yes, the Smithsonian, it would be amazing. Any the new Obama Center, I would love to do an iteration of the work there or yeah, any of my monument works, those types of things, it's yeah, it'd be incredible. This work specifically, the dream is that it continues to travel as an individual immersive artwork. But there's a larger project that that I'm working that goes simultaneously, which is I want to continue to work with this archive. The archive itself has so much valuable information that I can't contain it in one artistic installation. And sort of my own legacy work as an individual, I want to be able to uh yeah, create an opening for people to have access to the to that information. So I'm trying to find partner at universities, institutions, or nonprofits that would want to help fund a large data archive for these histories that could be more interactive in its searchability. There's 2,500 stories. And in my art installation, I was able to get over 900 people applied to read the stories for my show. I could only choose 25 of them, you know, and I got 45 or 50 stories read, but there's 2,500. So for me, there's this idea like if I can get every single one of those stories read by a living voice and have the fun. To support that, the amount of space that can open up. Again, the people reading the stories, their whole lives get changed by reading those stories. And they're all the friends and family they talk to as they're reading them all get a chance to learn more about these individuals. The descendants that would be able to find their family in these histories more readily and then hear somebody reanimate that voice or be able to go through and search the database for medicines for all of this incredible knowledge and have it really accessible. That's the dream is like, can I make a living archive that can really serve the people, serve genealogists, serve all kinds of fields of knowledge?

SPEAKER_00 22:43

Oh, this is such important work. Oh my God. And what an incredible thing to imagine a world. I mean, I spend a lot of time in a sort of vision space because I can't deal with what's happening in the real world right now. So I spend a lot of time trying to imagine what could be possible. And not in a fantasy kind of way, but like what can we really create now that has legs that can take us, carry us to a different future. And a project like this is exactly that butterfly effect that you're referring to, that with just one person hearing their story read, and how that could just have the ripple effect that changes so many things. And one of my hopes for this project is by just collecting our stories and bringing people around into person-to-person contact and sharing stories like the one you shared with me at the beginning of this show, about how we can learn from each other and what would be possible in a world where all of these stories are part of the fabric of our lives and the United States by itself, especially in

Turning Archives Into A Living Database

SPEAKER_00 23:45

contrast to what's happening now, if all of these stories were part of the fabric of our everyday life, how much richer could it be?

SPEAKER_01 23:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:55

And so anything that we can do. And I'm curious, so you've got your nonprofit organization, you've got your arts projects. Is the grief doula practice part of the, I heard you speaking to that again in this other podcast. Is that yet another arm of what you're doing, or is that separate?

SPEAKER_01 24:15

There is, yeah, the world of being a support and a guide through grief is so big. And there's so much need. There's so much need for it. I I don't work as a official grief doula or death doula. I'm connected very closely with many people who do and are doing that work on many levels from large-scale corporate work, which is full of grief, to individual families and communities and every frontline workers. I my work is, I think, like my grief doula work is on that larger scale with my art practice. Part of my practice is the ritual creating and holding space for grief. Every time you work in archive, every time you you work through ancestral work, you're working through grief. You're working through layers of grief. And no more than grief. There's there's all of there's anger, there's confusion, there's all of the different parts that fall around in grief, too. That all's there on a societal level. Social grief, social shame, social loss is a massive thing. And yeah, my my work individually, I'm not doing any type of counseling or anything like that on personal levels for people, but but I do help support ritual work. I'm a part of the grief sanctuary, Unache Grief Sanctuary here in New Mexico, which is a phenomenal organization who they host retreats for grievers and do a lot of co-care work. I I led a grief feast recently with them that was a phenomenal experience of bringing community together to talk openly about grief, grief from the personal and the bodily, all the way through the generational, societal, and ancestral, planetary, all of these things we all feel really differently. And so creating this space, the grief feast was a meal where every single course of the meal was centered around a different one of these layers of grief. And every course, the table would talk about that kind of grief while they ate and while they ingested it. So it's this idea that we not only invite grief to the table, but we we digest it together.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

That's beautiful. And it's not unlike an initiative that we have called The Art of Conversation, which is a project that we have adjacent to this podcast, where I bring seven strangers together every month, and we have prompts and quotes

Grief Feasts And Ritual As Care

SPEAKER_00 26:45

under each plate that invite people into the conversation about death as muse, grief, legacy, lineage, and all of these interwoven conversations. And it's been a really beautiful, I love what you just said, about metabolizing these very difficult sometimes to address topics and creating a space that is open for people to bring their personal stories, their adjacent stories. But there are very many places in our culture where we gather and do that.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like Uno She does a monthly grief cafe that's really just set up around that. And different facilitators come and bring various methodologies for moving through the practice.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

Yeah, one of the most beautiful things about this project for me has been having so many different conversations around this topic. So I've spoken recently with Joanna Ebenstein, who is the head of Morbid Anatomy, which is all focused around the death conversation, as well as many other people who are exploring different ways to approach burial practices and how we can incorporate different cultural histories and weave them into our burial practices and just the whole history of how we sanitized the death process and removed bodies from our homes. They get processed through the hospital instead of being a part of our everyday life. And the richness that gets lost from that, just like the richness that gets lost from our very fast-paced world moving at warp speed, and what gets lost when we lose these rituals around all of these practices. There's so much.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

There's so much to learn. I've had the incredible privilege to be able to care for the bodies of two of my close loved ones, like in the death process, being able to wash and wrap and honor, you know, including my mother's body, which was one of the most incredible things I could have ever done, to do even that simple work, the most phenomenal human practice you can do of caring for the body. And it is something that, yeah, we have been as a society, especially Western society, so so sanitized from. And I think it deeply feeds into then this epidemic of grief and people not being able to actually know how to move it out of their bodies because there are so many parts missing of the process. Yeah. You know, we're split from it, even in the medical worlds, too. Like there's just so much hidden and just shamed away from our suffering, even and co-suffering.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

Yeah. And even the whole funeral service industry, and not always intentionally, but it's become an industry. It's become this very transactional situation where they solve the problem of a body. It becomes a disposal issue instead of the sacred tradition that it could be. And it's always these very ironic things. But I think that one of the benefits of having a large digital platform like the internet is there can be so many cross-learnings across how different cultures address different rituals. And it could really potentially bring us together, but instead we get all swept up in the speed of it. And then we don't have the opportunity to learn things deeply. We learn things very superficially and then we move on to the next thing. So I love how your projects are sort of interrupting that speed and bringing people into immersive experiences where they can have a full sensory embodiment of the messages that you're bringing. And I also really love that you're touching on the environmental implications too, because one of the other things that's happened in our culture is that we've become so separate from the land and so separate from nature. And we tend to think of that as something that we control or manage. And I love that you're bringing that back into your body of work and bringing nature in as one of the characters, as one of the disrespected characters in the story.

SPEAKER_01 30:48

Absolutely. Absolutely. That grief is a constant grief of how the planet has been abused, mistreated, and there's not space, there's often not space at all to grieve for and grieve with the planet. And so it is an important part that weaves itself through all of my work as well, like this true relationship.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Well, I think people are very afraid of grief and they're afraid of pain and they're afraid of sadness. And I think it's because they think there isn't another side to it that there isn't a coming through it into another dimension. So can you speak to a little bit of about what your experience has been in terms of when you do confront grief, what is possible?

How Grief Transforms Through The Body

SPEAKER_01 31:30

Yeah, I think that I learn a lot, you know, one of my foundational personal practices is I study and work with a lot of Chinese medicine. And I think that has a strong understanding of the transformation part of grief. Grief in Chinese medicine is processed through the lung. And the lung is such an incredible organ, right? Such a phenomenal organ of filtration and of refinement, right? The air, the lung is pulling in all of this breath, but it's then filtering that breath through these little inner, what's the name? It's like it's alveolate. There's a beautiful name for these little feathers, but they're pulling the water out of the air. Right. So we're pulling the water out, and then that water becomes this foundational nutrient for our entire immune system, our nervous system. It feeds the kidneys, which then feed all of the organs, the blood. We don't talk about how much actual water we get from our breath. It's part of why our breath is life, because it contains this. And I think grief is like that too, and the way that the lungs work through grief, right? Grief is this huge breath. Like, and even when I think about it, when we are in deep grief, our body speaks to us, and often there's like universal sounds of grief. And one of them is that like this deep, full opening of the throat type of breath, trying to get like air into the body, like pulling this life into the body, and that desire for the lung to open up and pull life back into itself, right? And then to break apart that breath and pull out the water from it. That's the work, right? We pull grief in this huge way, and then our lungs like pull out the gold, the beauty, the preciousness. So as we move through grief, like actually transmute it through the body, through the breath process, through the grieving process, what comes is these little diamonds of what matters. What truly matters, what truly builds our soul, what builds our understanding of love. Like you don't know true love until you've lost it. Like we have all the songs about it. But the real truth is that we learn what is most valuable, we learn what is most precious, what is most important, and what is going to stick with us for the rest of our lives through that process of grief, through that refining process of grief. And then it feeds everything else. It feeds all of our organs, it feeds all of our mind and our spirit as we move forward. And then those who have moved through and with grief know that they've that through it you learn everything you could about who you are. You learn everything you could about like you not even could, but like you, it naturally happens. All of a sudden you are wiser. You are strong. You potentially are stronger. You see things differently, you love differently and relationship differently, and connection. And you and the people that are next to you, you appreciate even more because you know what happens through grief. So that's the thing I think is missing. Like you said, they don't realize that there's the other side, and the other side of it is a greater sense of our humanity.

SPEAKER_00 34:58

Yeah, and the capacity to be a space for other people to go through the process. It it certainly has informed my life. And if I hadn't lost both my parents at such a young age, you know, it's created such resilience within my system to be present for a myriad number of things in in my life, in other people's lives, et cetera. And I think it's another reason that's so important that we as a community get together and share our stories around grief and create a space for that. So I appreciate you said that. And it I also can't help but think of the lungs as like the trees of the world and what you just described as that metabolic process that grief goes through is exactly the experience of photosynthesis or the process of trees. And it's often talked about that the trees are like the lungs of the planet. And so, again, that the tree is the central figure in your current installation. I think it's really beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 35:57

It's really true. And I love that it is so connected. The tree, as I said, is made of cotton, and the the top of the tree has its branches, and they're naked branches. There's no leaves, it's just these thick naked branches. But we were wrapping them in this cotton that was soaked in cornstarch. And the way of wrapping was very much like wrapping a body. And as I was working with the fabricators and talking with them through that process, it was like we are like shrouding and wrapping and caring for each of these limbs and really thinking about that process. And so it's all connected, like all of these layers, you know. And I love that thought about the trees being the lungs of the planet, and because I do believe it is true that the trees really are processing our grief on the planet all of the time. The trees themselves are some of the most intelligent creatures or beings on the planet. They're able to utilize the mycilia, move energy, move food. There's this quality of relationality that trees really know very well. And that is one of the things that we learn in grief work. Again, we really learn this foundational way that we're all connected. You think in grief you learn about your separation and your isolation, but you actually learn about your connection and you learn about your way that you are truly inseparable, actually, from everything.

SPEAKER_00 37:31

Yeah, it is incredibly life-giving, which is again when people initially heard about this project and death as muse, it sort of is a a disconnect if we're not more deeply rooted in our humanity. But because for me, it's a conversation about connection, not a conversation about separation, and you've just illustrated that so beautifully. So I'm inclined to ask what's next, but it just seems like you have so many different tendrils that are out there in the world. Do you see a way that they will all eventually interconnect, or are they all interconnected already?

What’s Next: Monuments And New Shows

SPEAKER_01 38:11

Yeah, I think that they're all interconnected and my practice continues to grow. Like I said, there's these larger long-term projects that I'm gonna continue to work on around archive work in the art realms. I'm continuing to look for ways that I can, yeah, create public artworks that are centered around these layers of remembrance and bringing our pasts into relationship with our presents, you know, for the benefit of the future. Yeah, there's gonna be a lot. There's a lot of artworks that will come out of me in the next years. I have I have a couple projects on the in the wings. I just was shortlisted by New York City Arts and Culture and the Department of Cultural Affairs to create a monument to Billy Holiday in New York, which is so exciting. So we'll see what happens, what comes from that. Yeah, lifelong dream to be able to honor such a powerful and a phenomenal woman in the city. But yeah, my work will continue in archive for sure. And these monuments will come up, more will come, more community connections. It continues to grow.

SPEAKER_00 39:15

Yeah. I and I may have said off mic because we had a little bit of complications getting the technical side of this interview started. But I think before we actually got recording, I was telling you about a conversation that I had with Eric Mingus, who's the son of Charles Mingus, who lives now here in New Mexico. And he created a project called The Mill that's based on his return to his family ancestral lands in the South and getting transmitted this body of music that he's now called The Mill. And Yo-Yo Ma heard it, and he's done a collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma of his piece called The Mill, which is his voice, this incredibly beautiful, resonant voice that is the voice of his ancestors coming through him. And he has an idea for taking that project around the country, much the same that you're talking about, a project. I'd love to introduce the two of you and see what you guys could cook up. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 40:08

I mean, that's part of it, is that I am so thankful for the connections to other artists and collaborators. The work that I'm making is really about making space for this because it's it's it just keeps growing, right? Like I was in Australia, especially this Living Histories work in Australia. I was working with the Australian performers, and each one of those performers had transformative experiences, beautiful experiences, learning about these histories and invoking these bodies and moving through. And I would be so excited to be able to come to the states and work with artists like that, you know, and keep growing what this looks like to make space for ancestral voices, ancestral reconnection, honoring all these timelines. The I there's dancers here in the states that I am really looking forward to working with. I feel like any place that I install it, I'll be trying to gather new voices and people to fill the world of it. So there's definitely, yeah, so much incredible connection there.

SPEAKER_00 41:05

And you mentioned, I think earlier that one of your installations is the mask installation, I believe you said, is that at the Legacy Museum or is that yes, it's in Montgomery, Alabama, and it's a part of the free the legacy sites.

SPEAKER_01 41:17

There's the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, or the Lynching Museum, and then there's the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. And so my work is a huge 100-foot installation, long installation at the Freedom Park.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Well, what's interesting, Eric did a performance with Yo-Yo Ma of his piece at that same location. I don't even know if it was while you were installed, but it was within the last year or so, I think.

SPEAKER_01 41:42

So Yeah, well, we installed it. It was opened in 2024.

SPEAKER_00 41:45

So Yeah, I can't wait to introduce you guys. That's gonna be really cool. And I I wanted to just reiterate that the book of your mask show is being debuted on July 11th at the gallery in Albuquerque at the Richard Levy Gallery.

SPEAKER_01 42:00

Is that oh, Richard Levy Gallery? They have a show opening July 8th of editions, and so they'll have editions of my bronze masks, which are available, phenomenal, beautiful work, and one of my prints of a painting. And then I believe they have other works as well. So that's July 11th. I'm also opening a show at the Albuquerque Museum on June 20th, which I co-curated with William Gassaway. And I have work in the show as well as we have eight other phenomenal black artists, all doing work that is in a relationship with the land. Black artists in conversation with place and land in New Mexico. Phenomenal artists and working incredible mediums and material. So that's yeah, that's open June 20th. And then yeah, these other monument projects will be in the next couple years. That's absolutely incredible. And so the Biennale in Australia closes when? Uh it closes on June 14th, and I have a final performance on June 13th. Yeah. And so that's very soon, a couple weeks.

SPEAKER_00 42:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:59

And then you'll be back in New Mexico for a little while, or then I'll be back in New Mexico for a little while. I'll I'll come back to open the show at Albuquerque. And then you go back to Yale? Yale, I will go back probably in the fall. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 43:11

I really want to learn more about this Yale project. So maybe we can get together while you're in New Mexico. I can come up to Taos or something and see what you're up to there. I I want to learn a little bit more about your nonprofit organization, or maybe you could say just a f a few more words about that, where people can find it, how people might be able to get involved.

SPEAKER_01 43:29

Yeah, so we're online, Earthseed Black Arts Alliance, and you can reach out. I'm working partnership with Jakia Fuller, who's another phenomenal curator and artist in New Mexico. And the two of us run Earthseed currently. And yeah, you can find us online. We have various right now, sort of art initiatives and projects that we're doing. We have a little WhatsApp group and that we share amongst ourselves, like with opportunities, and we put stuff out on our social media opportunities for artists, particularly Black and Indigenous artists. And we have an ongoing arts residency in Taos. So we've hosted over 13 artists from around the country to come and stay and have free access to a space to rest and to revision and to dream and to new work and to have access to materials to work in. We, yeah, right now I have a summer resident there. And then we might do some just short, yeah, smaller residencies again in the fall. So they can find all of that on our social media and on our website.

SPEAKER_00 44:30

Thanks again so much for your time. I'm so glad I got you. And good luck with the rest of your time at Yale and good luck with your travels back to Sydney and back to Taos. And hopefully I'll catch up with you in New Mexico at some point and continue this conversation. I really want to learn more about my Pierre Pont connections, which is mortifying for me at the moment, but I'll recover. I mean, it's part of the reality of things, right?

SPEAKER_01 44:52

Yeah, well, I would say just to get you started, the book that was published by Yale is great. Yale and Slavery is the name of the book. And it's free online. You can get a free online PDF download or you can get it on Amazon. But yeah, Yale and Slavery. And there's a whole chapter on the PierPont, so you can get a little preview.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

I can't wait to give it for Christmas presents to everybody in my family. I found some info on our family. Along with your illustrious achievements, here you go. All right. Well, thanks again so much. I really appreciate this, and we'll catch up again soon. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Support Artstorming And Artbridge NM

SPEAKER_00 45:29

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