About

Nekisha Durrett (b. 1976 | Washington, DC) is a mixed-media artist who employs the visual language of mass media to bring forward histories that objects, places, and words embody, but are not often celebrated. Her expansive practice includes public art, social practice, installation, painting, sculpture and design. Through deep research and material investigation, she finds historical traces in the present that are filled with stories easily overlooked. Her work contemplates biases and the unreliability of memory, as information is filtered over time. Durrett illuminates individual and collective histories of Black life and imagination, addressing her own younger self and the stories she wished she had learned.

Durrett holds a BFA from The Cooper Union in New York City and MFA from The University of Michigan School of Art and Design as a Horace H. Rackham Fellow. She is the Howard University Social Justice Consortium Fellow, and a finalist for the 2023 Janet and Walter Sondheim Art Prize. Durrett has recently been awarded the commission for the ARCH Project at Bryn Mawr College in partnership with Monument Lab and is in production on Queen City, 35’ tall “vessel” in Arlington, VA that pays homage to 903 individuals displaced for the construction of the Pentagon in 1941.