To celebrate the installation of Break Water, the Office of the Arts held an opening reception at Waterfront Park on Saturday, March 22 that featured music, art activities by the Mobile Art Lab, and opening remarks from artist Nekisha Durrett. 

View the video with remarks from the artist. 

Special thanks to Wampoo Media for the video production.

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 sculpture’s centerpiece, crafted from blackened wood, evokes the sidewheel of the steamboat River Queen, a vessel symbolizing Black ownership and opportunity from 1898 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. 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. 

“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.”

Nekisha worked with Lanningsmith, a Baltimore-based fabrication team, to bring her vision for Break Water to Waterfront Park.

Nekisha Durrett is a D.C.-based 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.