Hand Tools
of Resilience

form & concept | April 2021

Hand Tools of Resilience is an international juried exhibition that appears throughout Nikesha Breeze’s Four Sites of Return. The project invited African diasporic and Indigenous artists to examine the conscious and unconscious tools that Black and Indigenous people have created to survive, thrive and build within oppressive and abusive systems. 

Artists from across the world conceptualized new tools with Afrofuturistic functionalities. They are tools that might extinguish gaslighting and passive racist treatment, or shields that represent covert and overt armor and talismans. They are wedges for loosening systems of supremacy and abuse, or chisels for shaping new Black and Indigenous realities. 

Convened by Nikesha Breeze, the jury included Indigenous artist Rose B. Simpson, Ghanaian artist and activist Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, artist Le’Andra LeSeur, and independent curator Isra Rene.

More.