nikki terry

NOTE: nikki prefers her name in lowercase.

Painting is the only way nikki can find acceptance to all that she witnessed from the age of seven.  Intertwined between grief and silence, her memories are layered into abstract stories. The world inside of these stories were created slowly.  nikki’s excavated surfaces, inspired by Mark Bradford and Gerhard Richter, are visceral responses to her life and a  belief that there are dark histories that haunt the existence of many silenced Black women. She builds layers of paint, then scrapes them away to reveal cracked walls that many of these women have come up against.  Walls not built to support but walls to separate, to degrade; to conceal racial hatred and patriarchal dominance.  She remembers her mother’s body co-existing as her father's punching bag.  She admits that her mother’s manic mind was never allowed to rest.  Nor was her body.  The hidden movement beneath the surfaces, and within the negative spaces in nikki’s paintings come from the duality of adding and subtracting. A constant fluctuation between her exterior life and her traumatized interior spaces.  nikki’s paintings are a revelation of remembering and covering up–of tearing down walls and knocking down buildings.  She is guiding us through the emotional maps of patriarchal dominance in her home.  Dominance that stripped away any dreams her mother may have dreamed, and dominance that deferred her cadence towards a grounded identity. A native of Baltimore, nikki draws upon her childhood experiences for creating the architectural shapes in her work—shapes that house both safety and powerlessness.  She had to return to those experiences because there are so many parts of her identity that are still unsettled.  As she removes the veil, nikki reveals to us what has been hidden underneath.  Her excavated surfaces place new layers as if guiding us onto a path of an emerging identity.  she reimagines old narratives that can no longer rest in darkness.  She needed to address those broken parts of who she is in order to propel the volume of other silenced Black women with similar experiences.  nikki wants all Black women to be honest, and to fight for fortitude.A self-taught artist, nikki paints with her hand.  She admits that using paint brushes creates too much friction between what she feels, and how to get those feelings onto the canvas.  Painting is the one space that she does not want to fight against fears of self expression and emotional process. 

My paintings are abstract storytelling. Stories that honor the struggles of Black women healing from the denial of suffrage that benefited other people. In bell hooks' essay, “Homeplace”, she writes, “I want to remember these black women today. The act of remembrance is a conscious gesture honoring their struggle, their effort to keep something for their own.” The world inside my paintings are created slowly with a constant fluctuation between the exterior and interior spaces Black women hold in their bodies.  I build layers of paint, then scrape them away to reveal the cracked walls that Black women have faced. Walls built not to support but to separate, to degrade; to conceal racial hatred and patriarchal dominance.  I draw upon my own experiences of witnessing the women in my family be silenced and treated with disdain. I feel the urgent need to address their broken parts.  I am taking old stories and creating reimagined narratives that are no longer resting in darkness but now have a voice.  In my work, I explore what I believe joy should be for Black women: inspiration to be honest, to fight with fortitude, and to be fearless. Together we are healing away the shame.

NJ

USA