Artist Talk and Viewing of Break Water with Nekisha Durrett

Join artconnexDC for a special artist talk and viewing of Break Water, a new public art installation by Nekisha Durrett at the Waterfront in Alexandria, VA. In addition, we will hear from Diane Ruggiero, Director of the City of Alexandria’s Office of the Arts, about their award-winning public art series, Site See. Following the talk, we will gather for coffee and conversation.

How to get there

About Break Water

Break Water is the seventh iteration of Site See: New Views in Old Town, an annual series of temporary public art that brings residents and visitors to Waterfront Park in Alexandria, Virginia, to interact with contemporary art in a historic location. Site See is commissioned by Alexandria’s Public Art Program, a part of the City of Alexandria’s Office of the Arts.

The Alexandria Waterfront, a historic site now prone to frequent flooding, has long been a place where natural forces and human activity intersect, often with profound consequences. The City of Alexandria’s newest public art installation—Break Water by Nekisha Durrett—seeks to engage with this intersection by reflecting on the overlooked narratives of Black lives tied to this waterfront—lives that have been both disregarded and central to the shaping of this space.

Break Water’s centerpiece, crafted from wood, evokes the sidewheel of the steamboat River Queen, a vessel that symbolized Black ownership and opportunity until its mysterious destruction by fire in 1911, shortly after its purchase by Lewis Jefferson, a Black entrepreneur. Encircled by black sandbags, the piece honors the resilience and strength of Black communities, referencing both protection and endurance during crises.

Durrett explains, “In Break Water, these black sandbags serve not only as mere barriers; they symbolize the ocean’s breakwaters and connect to the American scholar Fred Moten’s concept of the jazz ‘break’ as a site of Black resistance and innovation - a moment of disruption and possibility within the relentless flow of time and history.”

Beneath the sculpture, a ground mural of tangled taut ropes – called “Life Lines” – appears to tether the artwork to the park’s architectural elements, anchoring it against a symbolic undercurrent. Viewers are invited to walk the lifelines, that are each accompanied by a specific history, event, person, place, ritual, or tradition that has contributed to Alexandria’s unique identity. The painted lines symbolize the collective struggle to preserve these legacies, ensuring they are not swept away. Together, the sculpture and the mural create a powerful tribute to the resilience, creativity, and enduring spirit of Alexandria’s Black community.

Break Water opens at the end of March 2025 and will be on view through November 2025.

About Nekisha Durrett

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 an 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 was a finalist for the 2023 Janet and Walter Sondheim Art Prize. Her installation Queen City, a 35’ tall “vessel”, opened in May 2023 in Arlington, VA, paying homage to the 903 individuals displaced for the construction of the Pentagon in 1941. Durrett was awarded the commission for the ARCH Project at Bryn Mawr College in partnership with Monument Lab, where her piece Don't Forget to Remember (Me) opened in April 2024. Durrett’s public art installation, Break Water, opens in April 2025 at the Waterfront in Alexandria, VA.