NEW Ma's House podcast episode with January 2025 resident artist Nadira Foster-Williams! In this episode, we discuss mythology, performance, grief, healing, community, resistance, and more.
Nadira is a multidisciplinary artist dedicated to exploring transmutation and radical curiosity through multimedia art and theatre-making. Their work challenges colonial constructs that have historically disconnected Blackness from wholeness, mythology, and the fantastical. By weaving together performance, visual storytelling, and immersive experiences, they confront institutions of colorism and paternalism while reclaiming narratives that celebrate Black love, belonging, and esoteric traditions.
A key highlight of their practice was their contribution to Miles Greenberg’s The Embrace at the Faurschou Museum. This durational performance blurred the boundaries between sculpture and life, exploring the presence of Black bodies in art and public space. As noted in Brooklyn Rail, the performance invited audiences to witness and reflect on the power of Black tenderness-challenging societal perceptions of intimacy and existence. Foster-Williams’ involvement in The Embrace underscores their commitment to performance as a form of protest, centering Black narratives that resist erasure and demand visibility.
Through their work, Foster-Williams reimagines identity, power, and the surreal, bridging the gaps between the mystical and the political. Inspired by thinkers like Michael R. Jackson, they seek to dismantle imposed limitations on Blackness, addressing the estrangement between Black identity and the fantastical, the occult, and mythology. Their art serves as both an interrogation and a celebration-inviting audiences to question, dream, and engage in a world where Blackness is whole, unbound, and luminous.
www.nadira.work/