Nkosi Nesmith-Nelson

Nkosi Nesmith-Nelson is a fourth year Art major from Atlanta, Georgia. Their practice explores the nuanced visual language of polarization by re-presenting bodies in correspondance with the context of their physical location. Through meditating on their metaphysical ties to certain historical pasts, present tenses, and aesthetic possibilities, they attempt to realize, or rather reveal, constructed assumptions, preconceptions, and misconceptions within the mind of a colonized public. Moreover, they are interested in the emancipation of the Black body through the re-presenting or re-imagining of spaces or scenes that expose, contradict, or completely disregard the Western hegemoic subconscious. Nkosi’s current research explores the documentation of ancient Mediterranean aesthetics by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his book, The History of Art of Antiquity. More specifically, they elaborate on how this volume injects the modern invention of white supremacy, an ideology which relies on the subjugation, dehumanization, and consumption of Black and Brown bodies, within an antiquital past. Through their research they ask: what are the origins of anti-blackness and how is it connected to the warping of Greco-Roman ancient aesthetics in an external colonial effort aimed at validating white supremacy?