Saturday, November 22
5PM-7PM
Free RSVP on Eventbrite
Monuments, Memory and Black Futures is a panel facilitated by international interdisciplinary artist Nikesha Breeze, in dialogue with artists Dario Camese, Dominic Chambers, and Kwadwo Adae, exploring how artists, memory keepers and cultural workers are creating and holding space for Black memorials and Black futurity in public life. Together they will examine and explore how they have used material, technology, and space to uplift and imagine Black liberation in the present and future.
This program is part of the nation-wide Fall of Freedom weekend. Across the nation, artists and community organizers are gathering November 21-22, 2025 as part of an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation. Through a wave of creative resistance, venues of all kinds are hosting exhibitions, performances, and public events that celebrate the experiences, cultures, and identities that shape the fabric of the nation.
ABOUT NIKESHA BREEZE
Nikesha Breeze is an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, painting, performance, dance, and film. Rooted in African diasporic and Afro-Futurist practice, Breeze creates immersive, multi-sensory environments that honor ancestral memory and reclaim erased histories. Through layered materiality and process, their work bridges archival research, storytelling, and embodied ritual, engaging themes of grief, power, remembrance, sanctuary, and Black futurity. Breeze’s practice is both research-driven and experiential, constructing spaces for reflection, dialogue, and transformation. They live and work in the high desert of Taos, New Mexico, on the unceded land of the Taos Pueblo People.Born In Portland, Oregon Nikesha is an African American descendant of the Mende People of Sierra Leone and Assyrian American immigrants from Iran.
ABOUT DARIO CALMESE
Dario Calmese is an artist, creative director, and design theorist whose work interrogates how identity and history are constructed through image, design, and cultural systems. His multidisciplinary practice spans photography, fashion, performance, and critical theory, with a focus on reclaiming narratives and reimagining the lived experience. In 2020, Dario made history as the first Black photographer to shoot a cover for Vanity Fair, capturing the iconic Viola Davis. As the founder of the Institute of Black Imagination, he is pioneering a global platform for Black creativity and futurism, redefining how history is preserved, how culture is produced, and how imagination shapes the world we inherit. Through his groundbreaking projects—from archiving the cultural voids of the past to designing speculative futures—Dario is ensuring that the next generation has not only a seat at the table but the blueprint for a new world.
A 2023 Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Dario also teaches at Parsons School of Design and served on the global advisory board for Estée Lauder Companies. His creative direction spans partnerships with Alvin Ailey, Adobe Lightroom, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vogue Mexico, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
ABOUT DOMINIC CHAMBERS
Born in St. Louis and residing and working in New Haven, Conn., Dominic Chambers creates vibrant paintings that simultaneously engage art historical models, such as color-field painting and gestural abstraction, and contemporary concerns around race, identity, and the necessity for leisure and reflection. A writer himself, Chambers is often inspired by literature and has cited Magical Realism, alongside writings by W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, as significantly influential to his practice. Chambers received his B.F.A from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Milwaukee, WI in 2016, and his M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2019.
ABOUT KWADWO ADAE
Kwadwo Adae is a New Haven based, Ghanian-American visual artist and muralist. After earning his Masters Degree in painting from New York University in 2005, he founded the Adae Fine Art Academy; an independent art school specializing in the individualized instruction of drawing and painting in all levels and media to children, teenagers, and adults. In his fervent explorations in the medium of oil paint Adae experiments through multiple genres of visual language; from figurative and floral works created from live observation, to purely non-objective works of art that push the boundaries of painting and sculpture in thickly textured artworks that echo the high vibrancy of cultural aesthetics from the Ashanti tribe of Ghana. Adae is strongly committed to contributing to the discourse of public art that amplifies the voices of the underserved by focusing his investments and public artistic endeavors in local communities that were subjected to discriminatory redlining policies.