Nahaya Fine Art Gallery

08/10/2026

Dance of Heritage explores movement, ancestry, and cultural continuity through two dancers rendered as an ebony-and-ivory sculpture. Facing one another in a suspended moment of ballet, their bodies create a conversation of strength, grace, and balance.

The woman’s sweeping ostrich-feather skirt contrasts with the sculptural darkness of her figure, while her long textured braids echo the movement of the dance. Her partner answers her pose with an extended line of his own. Behind them, an Art Deco interpretation of Eastern Woodlands-inspired geometry brings turquoise, earth red, gold, ivory, and deep charcoal into the composition.

Rather than separating classical ballet from Indigenous visual language, the work allows the traditions to meet~creating a ballet imagined through another cultural lens. , , , , , , , , , , ,

08/09/2026

This portraits got me working day and night😊hee hee

08/09/2026

WIP for an album cover!

08/09/2026

Work in Ptogress
A friend wanted cover for his album, well I’m working on it night and day! 😂

08/09/2026

Repost Lane

I’m tired of fake historians assuming that every dark-skinned person in early America must have been African—and then forcing every tribe, document and family into that conclusion.I’m tired of Black Indigenous people being told that our existence requires African admixture. A Black Indian does...

08/08/2026

The Moor Takes Paris
Everybody is looking… just not at the same person. The Moor, The Wife and The Paramour.

08/08/2026

The Bookworm, bookworm, reader, reading, books, book lover, literature, bibliophile, love of reading, woman reading, reading art, literary art, library art, intellectual woman, contemplative art, quiet moments, candlelight, candlelit interior, expressive painting, expressionist art, figurative painting, contemporary figurative art, abstract figurative, colorful interior, storytelling art, knowledge, imagination, education, wisdom, solit

08/08/2026

The Bookworm captures the private world of a reader completely absorbed in the written word. An oversized open book stretches across the seated figure’s lap while a second figure quietly occupies the candlelit background. Stacks of books, suspended points of light, saturated color and rhythmic incised lines transform an intimate interior into a place of imagination and contemplation.

The deliberately simplified figures and unconventional perspective preserve the expressive character of the original painting, while the enormous book becomes both object and metaphor—a doorway into another world.

Nahaya © 2026

08/08/2026

To be young, gifted and brown
From the Little Dancer to Center Stage
Edgar Degas captured the world of ballet with extraordinary beauty, but the world he painted in nineteenth-century Paris was also a world of boundaries~of class, race, access, and belonging. His Little Dancer Aged Fourteen stands almost as a witness to that history: a young dancer waiting at the threshold, disciplined and determined, yet still subject to a world that decided who would be seen and who would be allowed to rise.

Generations later, dancers of color possessed the same discipline, grace, musicality, and ambition, but the doors of classical ballet remained painfully narrow. Talent alone did not guarantee a place in the corps de ballet, much less the opportunity to become a soloist or principal dancer.
Then artists began building doors of their own.
In 1958, Alvin Ailey founded Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, creating a company where dancers whose artistry had too often been overlooked could command the stage. Ailey expanded the language of concert dance, drawing upon memory, spirituality, blues, gospel, and lived experience. His dancers were not standing outside someone else’s tradition asking permission to enter. They were creating a tradition that audiences around the world would come to recognize as essential American art.
A decade later, in 1969, Arthur Mitchell—who had already broken a formidable barrier as the first African-descended principal dancer of New York City Ballet~co~founded Dance Theatre of Harlem with Karel Shook. Mitchell’s message was revolutionary in its simplicity: classical ballet belonged to these dancers, too. Pointe shoes, tutus, Balanchine choreography, Swan Queens and principal roles were not the inheritance of one complexion.
That history is what I see traveling through this diptych.
On one side stands the small bronze dancer~a remembrance of Degas and the nineteenth-century ballet world. Across the divide rises the contemporary ballerina: powerful, illuminated, fully extended and occupying the space that earlier generations were so often denied.
The golden line connecting them is not merely decorative.
It is a lineage.
It travels from the dancer who waited, to the artists who challenged exclusion, to Mitchell and Ailey building institutions, and finally to generations of ballerinas who could step onto the stage knowing that someone before them had fought to make room.
The little dancer looks upward.
The ballerina rises.
And between them runs more than a century of determination~the journey from being observed at the margins of ballet to becoming the artist at center stage.