How History Is

I never thought the day would come when I would see, in the multitude of galleries here in Santa Fe, anything remotely relevant to the concerns of our times. My son’s Ellsworth Gallery is an exception, often showing the work of young, unknown Native American artists, but it is surrounded by blocks of galleries catering to our appetite for the decorative. It was not always so: a generation ago, the town was known for introducing examples of work that might surprise or even horrify, but as the tourist crowd has grown larger, displacing collectors, our appetite for the comfortable and colorful has taken over.

So I was delighted to visit, yesterday morning, Nikesha Breeze’s astonishing show, “Four Sites of Return: Ritual, Remembrance, Reparation, Reclamation” at form & concept gallery. Breeze, an African American woman whose forebears lived in the since-erased black town of Blackdom, in Southern New Mexico, sets out to create ”ritual and ancestral reclamation of Black, Indigenous, Queer and Earth Bodies.”

I was immediately struck by a white tree—cotton often appears in these displays—with a bowl of colored beads and another bowl of mysterious fine blue powder beneath it. We were invited to chose three to five beads, saying a prayer for each lost and erased black person in our lives, then string the beads on slender wire and hang it on the tree. Although they were from the ranks of white privilege, I added my youngest brother and my youngest son to the names of the black people who cared for us during our childhoods, realizing that although I have written about each of these people, I have never said each name with a prayer: ”Say Her Name…”

The Reparation part of the show is surrounded by three long walls of black faces molded in clay as Breeze allowed their essence to shape the work of her hands. These are not portraits but the death masks of faces I imagine long lost and forgotten.

Large, compelling paintings of actual 19th century black Americans, dominate the Remembrance section, powerful in their sense of the unsayable. Breese writes, “Blackness is the refusal to be reduced… To remember is to hold what was, what is, and what will be”—the only way to wholeness. The impression of these portraits is of an overpowering silence, words never spoken and never to be spoken in the delicate women’s faces, based on early photographs, or the staring eyes of two small children. Since there would have been no market for these portraits in nineteenth-century America, they were often taken just to prove the reliability of the cameras of the times.

For me, as a writer, the most revolutionary part of the show is the long line of framed pages from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness hung in an upstairs gallery. Trusting to her instinct for what she is looking for, Breeze carefully and slowly circled words on the pages which for her probed deep into Conrad’s racism and his assumptions about black lives. For how many generations have we English majors labored through this text, uncomfortably aware of subsurface currents we had no way of discussing in the context of a great Western White Novel? The holy, or what is assumed to be holy, like the classics of our literature, is laid bare by Breeze’s intuition. I will never again look at the so-called Great Books without sensing—as already I sensed in their portrayal of women—a great and grievous lack, a parading of falsehoods.

Words can’t convey the power, the originality, and the absolutely essential nature of Nikisha Breeze’s work. I wish everyone reading these words could see it.

In Art Santa Fe