Yale School of Art welcomes CARE artists-in-residence, Nikesha Breeze and Rashida Bumbray

This fall, the Yale School of Art is welcoming two artists to New Haven, selected by the Yale Committee for Art Recognizing Enslavement (CARE), to create artworks that address Yale’s historical roles and associations with slavery, as well as the legacy of that history.

Nikesha Breeze and Rashida Bumbray were selected from almost 200 artists who responded to the CARE’s Call for Art last fall. Both artists will be in residence in New Haven during the Fall 2025 semester, and while here, Breeze and Bumbray will be connecting with the community and embedding themselves in New Haven’s history.

In addition to proposing long-term public art installations, the artists are also tasked with formulating programming that fosters reflection, remembrance, discussion, learning, and healing. These artistic interventions are intended to facilitate a productive and meaningful difference in our shared communities.

Nikesha Breeze is an international artist working across a diverse range of media—including oil painting, clay and bronze sculpture, installation, performance art, and film. Grounded in a global African diasporic and Afro-Futurist perspective, Breeze’s layered, immersive works draw on African diasporic research, reclamation, and memorial, forging otherworldly spaces rich with storytelling and historical education. Breeze’s practice employs multiple materials and methodologies that call upon ancestral memory and archival resurrection to revive stories long erased from the global narrative, engaging directly with themes of grief, sanctuary, power and presence, visibility, and erasure.

Breeze’s innovative approach has garnered national acclaim. In 2021, their expansive 5,000-square-foot solo exhibition “Four Sites Of Return” was featured in American Art Collector, Hyperallergic, Metalsmith Magazine, and The New York Times. A collaborative work, “Stages of Tectonic Blackness,” earned the National Performance Network Creative Fund and Development Fund Grant. Earlier, at the 2018 International ARTPRIZE exhibition, Nikesha received the juried 3D Grand Prize Award and the Contemporary Black Arts Award for the sculptural installation, 108 Death Masks: A Communal Prayer for Peace and Justice—a work that in 2024 was recreated in bronze and included in the permanent collection of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama, honoring the six million lives lost in enslavement in the United States.

Originally from Portland, Oregon, Nikesha Breeze now 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’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as MoCADA Museum, The Albuquerque Museum, University Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and the NkinKyim Museum of Ghana, as well as at fine art galleries and art fairs around the globe.

Rashida Bumbray is an award-winning choreographer, curator, and filmmaker deeply rooted in Black vernacular and folk traditions, including ring shouts, hoofing, and Blues improvisation. Like Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham, Bumbray merges curatorial and ethnographic methodologies with avant-garde practices, crafting intimate performances and films reimagining sacred and secular rituals. Her work explores the architectures of improvisation, surrender, and possession, offering poignant responses to contemporary experiences of displacement, erasure, and collective forgetting.

Bumbray’s practice has earned numerous accolades, including the 2024 Anonymous Was A Woman Award, a 2024 Ruby’s Artist Award, a 2024 Tate Infinities R&D Award, and a 2019 United States Artist Fellowship. She was Civic Practice Artist in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2017 to 2021. Her performances and films have been presented by institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Black Star Film Festival; Dia: Chelsea (with Leslie Hewitt); Harlem Stage; Dancing While Black; SummerStage; Tate Modern (with Simone Leigh); the New Museum (with Simone Leigh), and Project Row Houses. Her work, Run Mary Run, was named among The New York Times’s best performances of 2012 and is featured in Common’s short film, “Black America Again” (2016), directed by Bradford Young. She was nominated for a Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and continues to push the boundaries of dance, film, and ritual performance. A graduate of Oberlin College, Bumbray also has an MA in Africana Studies from New York University. Her writing on contemporary art, cultural studies, and comparative literature is published in journals and exhibition catalogs.

In June 2023, Yale University launched the Yale Committee for Art Recognizing Enslavement, which includes representatives from both the Yale and New Haven communities The committee is working with (and soliciting input from) members of the campus and New Haven communities to commission works of art and related programming to address Yale’s historical roles and associations with slavery and the slave trade, as well as the legacies of that history.

CARE is administered through the Dean’s Office at the Yale School of Art which is staffed by Maya Lwazi Rose, Senior Administrative Assistant for the Dean’s Office and Annie Lin, Director of Community Engagement and Strategies.

Members of the New Haven and Yale communities are invited to send a message to the committee about their thoughts on art and programming that address Yale’s historical roles and associations with slavery and the slave trade, please email care.committee@yale.edu.