Meet Nikki Brooks

She/Her · Maryland, US · Painter

Nikki Brooks is a multi-disciplinary artist that works specifically in installations and assemblage that are infused with digital and audio elements, paintings, sculpted text, and collage spaces. These works encourage the viewer to connect in forms of writing, storytelling,and shared dialogue through workshops that focus on diversity, inclusion, truth- telling and lament. The goal of the work is to shed light on how whiteness has weighed on the social, economical, and physical disparities within the black community and provides an illusion of comfort to draw in non-black audiences to provide a deeper window into how whiteness has remained silent and taken an off hands approach to these issues that still plague the black community. These showings also highlight how normalized these traumatic experiences are to the black community; the installations and assemblages are created to provide a healing space for black identity by providing a space for n on-black audiences to independently explore and grapple with the uncomfortable topics amongst one another. In Nikki’s mind she wanted to free black audiences from having to explain something so didactic and visual.