About the Project
D.C.-based mixed media artist Nekisha Durrett brings history forward through modern visual language in artwork shown across the country.
Her installation Break Water is on display in Waterfront Park from late March to November 2025. The sculpture draws inspiration from Alexandria’s waterfront being a place where natural forces and human activity intersect, often with profound consequences.
The centerpiece represents the sidewheel from the steamboat River Queen, a vessel that carried the promise of Black ownership during the early 20th century. Encircled by black sandbags, the sculpture is a tribute to the strength and resilience of Black Americans who have endured systemic marginalization while creating spaces of belonging and creativity. In contrast to the dark tones of the sandbags and sculpture, the ground mural displays colorful graphics and shuffleboard games, echoing the vibrant life on deck of the River Queen.
“The word ‘break’ is central to the artwork and conjures multiple layers of meaning,” said Durrett. “In jazz, the ‘break’ is a moment of improvisation, a rupture in the music where new possibilities emerge. It is in this spirit that Break Water seeks to reclaim and reinterpret the break as both a physical and metaphorical space of resistance, memory and transformation.”
About Nekisha Durrett
Nekisha Durrett 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.