I am not an artist until the community tells me that I am. – John T. Scott
Over the past decade, Nic[o] Brierre Aziz has sampled and re-mixed references to a diverse cast of characters – among them: Charles Deslondes, William Wells Brown, Robert E. Lee, Jean Michel Basquiat, R. Kelly, Katz & Besthoff, Jean Louis Allard, and Jeff Koons. Whether turning to Southern antebellum history or contemporary art markets, Aziz’s work interrogates the de/valuation of Black life and cultural heritage, both exposing and subverting systems of cultural, political, and economic power. Nic[o] Brierre Aziz: Sweet Surrender is the New Orleanian artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, and surveys a range of works in performance, photography, sculpture, and installation created over the last ten years. The exhibition highlights themes such as extraction, renunciation, sensuality, time, place, and power that are at the heart of Aziz’s practice.
Across his wide-ranging output, Aziz deploys hallmark conceptualist strategies such as appropriation, satire, and institutional critique. Many works reference histories of enslavement and their afterlives, particularly in Louisiana and Haiti, through the visual and material traces of cotton, sugar, molasses, water, and Confederate monuments. In these, Aziz asks us to consider how past histories of extraction and exploitation continue to haunt not only our shared civic and memorial landscapes, but also the contemporary entertainment, sports, and cultural industries.
The exhibition title’s reference to the “sweet” not only refers to plantation cash crops, such as sugar, but also sensuality and pleasure as central facets of the human experience and our engagement with art and culture. And with “surrender,” Aziz invokes the process of renunciation: the acceptance of one’s calling to a creative practice, and the necessary abandonment of control that it entails. Many of Aziz’s works mine the archives of his own artistic journey, such as rejection and resignation letters among other institutional and personal effects. At times subversive, humorous, and confessional, Sweet Surrender reflects the artist’s love of community and his belief in the arts as an essential facet of both personal and collective freedom.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Aziz received his M.F.A. in Sculpture from Yale University in 2025, and lives and works between New York, New Haven and New Orleans.
