Team 1 — HAND TOOLS OF RESILIENCE

JURY & CURATORS

NIKESHA BREEZE

New Mexico: Lead Curator

Working from a global African diasporic, Afrocentric and Afrofuturist perspective, Nikesha Breeze’s interdisciplinary work reimagines the possibility of healing intergenerational traumatic inheritance through the intersection of art and ritual. Black, Brown, Indigenous, Queer and Earth bodies, material and immaterial, are seen as undeniably sacred and inviolable.

Originally from Portland, OR, Nikesha Breeze lives and works in the high desert of New Mexico. They are an American-born, African diaspora descendant of the Mende People of Sierra Leone and Assyrian-American immigrants from Iran.

ROSE B. SIMPSON

Santa Clara Pueblo

My life-work is a seeking out of tools to use to heal the damages I have experienced as a human being of our postmodern and postcolonial era—objectification, stereotyping, and the disempowering detachment of our creative selves through the ease of modern technology. These tools are sculptural pieces of art that function in the psychological, emotional, social, cultural, spiritual, intellectual and physical realms. The intention of these tools is to cure, therefore, my hope is that they become hard-working utilitarian concepts.
Rose B. Simpson is a mixed-media artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, NM. Her work engages ceramic sculpture, metals, fashion, performance, music, installation, writing, and custom cars. She received an MFA in Ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011, an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2018, is collected in museums across the continent, and has exhibited internationally. She lives and works from her home at Santa Clara Pueblo, and hopes to teach her young daughter how to creatively engage the world.

KWAME ACOTO-BAMFO

Ghana

Kwame Akoto-Bamfo is a versatile Ghanaian artist who is known for his historical Nkyinkyim installation, cultural activism and contributions to Ghanaian tertiary institutions and traditional communities.
His outdoor sculpture and installation Nkyinkyim, dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Transatlantic slave trade, is on display at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. The work is directly connected to a larger installation of the same name made up of over 1,500 portraits of Africans in the Diaspora.

LE’ANDRA LESEUR

New York/New Jersey

Le’Andra LeSeur (b. 1989 in Bronx, NY) is an artist working primarily with video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. Her work celebrates blackness, contemplates the experience of invisibility, and seeks to dismantle and reclaim stereotypes surrounding black female identity, among other subject matters.

Awards include Leslie-Lohman Museum Artists Fellowship (2019), the Time-Based Medium Prize as well as the Juried Grand Prize at ArtPrize 10 (2018). LeSeur recently appeared in conversation with Marilyn Minter at the Brooklyn Museum, presented by the Tory Burch Foundation and has lectured at RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI and SCAD Atlanta, among others.

ISRA RENE
Chicago

Isra Rene (she/they) is an independent curator and cultural producer working to strengthen bridges that center and envision collective care as sites of re-imagination. They invite you to share your care as currency and reimagine holistic and creative ways to protect black queer lives.
With a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College, and MA in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Isra possesses a multi-faceted background encompassing art and design advising, public art initiatives and curatorial management. They have spearheaded early college access programs and has served as the Museum Education Graduate Scholar at the Art Institute of Chicago. They have been a guest lecturer and panelist for varying consortiums around the topics of community engagement, arts activism and arts accessibility. Israel is a recipient of the Audre Lorde Scholar Activist Award, Outstanding Scholarship in Women Studies Award and Honorary Leadership Award.

EXHIBITION Gallery and Museum CURATORS

JORDAN EDDY
New Mexico

Jordan Eddy is the director of form & concept and Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, and cofounder of the project space No Land. As an arts journalist and critic, he has contributed to The Magazine, Santa Fe New Mexican, Santa Fe Reporter, Visual Art Source, New Mexico Magazine and other publications. Jordan is originally from Eugene, Oregon, and has lived in Santa Fe since 2012.

MARISA SAGE
New Mexico

Marisa Sage has planned and executed over 100 international exhibitions, which included more than 200 individual artists globally. Recently Sage served as University Art Gallery Director at New Mexico State University (NMSU).
Sage is a New York native, who received her BFA in photography from Syracuse University and Masters of Digital Art at Maryland Institute College of Art. She established Like the Spice Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn which held over 65 exhibitions between 2006 and 2012.