SITES OF RESISTANCE: Marie Alarcón, Nikesha Breeze, Nansi Guevara

Marie Alarcón (RAiR 2021–22 Resident) is a multimedia artist based in Philadelphia, PA. She has a B.A. in Non-Fiction Filmmaking and Post Colonial Studies from The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA, and a Masters of Fine Arts with a Certificate in Time Based Media, from the University of Pennsylvania, School of Art and Design. Alarcón has worked in community media as an educator and producer through Scribe Video Center, as well as being a teaching artist for numerous arts and educational organizations in Philadelphia, PA, Olympia, WA, and Portland OR. Alarcón’s work is inspired by liminality, hybridity and the way that cinema functions as collective memory. Using digital manipulation and animation in her work, she is interested in digital/analog hybrids that reclaim a tactile relationship to the hyper-real. Her relationship to environment and place is informed by psychogeography, and notions of place and its production.

Nikesha Breeze (516 ARTS and NMSU University Art Museum 2022 Exhibiting Artist), originally from Portland, Oregon, lives and works in the high desert of New Mexico. She is an American born African Diaspora descendant of the Mende People of Sierra Leone, and Assyrian American Immigrants from Iran. Breeze’s interdisciplinary work reimagines the possibility of healing inter-generational 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. Her work centers Black bodies, simultaneously existing within realms of past, present, and future. She uses performance art, film, painting, textiles, sculpture, and site-specific engagement to build a counter-narrative of an Otherwise, where Black bodies and ideas are seen as existing in hypervalue, a realm of indivisibility between Black artistic aesthetic, Black time, and ritual healing. Black pasts become re-informed by Black futures, and the resulting present is experienced as a living altar and artifact.

Nansi Guevara (SFAI 2022 Revolution Resident) is a designer, artist, and teacher based in Brownsville, Texas. Originally from Laredo, Texas, she holds a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts in Design from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master’s in Education from Harvard University. She is currently focused on design, education, and community public art to create spaces of resistance and affirmation, and economies of community cultural wealth and support. She is a graphic designer, an illustrator, and a textile/rasquache based public artist. She runs her own freelance design & education practice, Corazón Contento, based out of Brownsville, Texas. She is an adjunct lecturer at the School of Art at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Guevara has been awarded residencies, fellowships, and grants from the NEA, Artplace America, a Blade of Grass, NALAC, and most recently the Santa Fe Art Institute Revolution Residency.