Nekisha Durrett’s large–scale portraits—the artwork averages more than four feet in width—reveal her interest in the ubiquity of popular media. Combining drawing and photography, these personalities are transmuted from photographic representations into the semblance of illustrative logos.

Rendered with flat colors, compound shapes and articulated line, the drawings present an abridged version of the sitter. This paring down of information simulates the form and function of a graphic logo inviting the viewer to ponder meaning. The stark, graphic quality of these tactile drawings coupled with their narrative ambiguity arrives at an aesthetic that is at once literal and poetic.

Nekisha Durrett earned her B.F.A. at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. A Horace H. Rackham Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, she went on to earn an M.F.A. in Photography in 2000. Durrett was an Artist-in-Residence at the Corcoran College of Art + Design the following year.

Durrett’s photographic portraits of African-American teenagers in the Washington, D.C. area were featured in the exhibition Rising Voices. Her work was most recently featured in Me, You & Those Other Folks at Gallery at Flashpoint, in Washington, DC, and Vote With Your Art at the OK Harris Gallery in New York. Durrett currently lives and works in Washington, DC.