About
Nailah Garard is a 27-year-old budding agroecologist and multidisciplinary artist born and based in the ancestral lands of the Massapequa and Merricks. Her lifelong artistic endeavours meet up with land stewardship rooted in ancestral practices of Black agrarianism and community care. Through ink, soil, sweat, and sound waves, she seeks the stories of the land and people and blends artistic landscaping and ecological science. Her process connects to the natural world and by extension the body.
Nailah specializes in landscape design and regenerative agriculture to create places that are functionally sustainable, intuitive, and aesthetically beautiful. Her visual art incorporates found local earth materials to transform acrylic and oil paintings into textured forms that preserve her practice of careful attention to her environment, inviting others to do the same. Nailah’s works recognize a need for embodied healing and regenerative ways to hold collective grief amid political and economic turmoil grounded in ecowomanist traditions and spirituality.
Nailah is interested in how practices of place-making, oral histories and multidisciplinary art repair misrepresentations of Black and Native life descending from US enslavement and colonialism. She collects oral histories from farmers and food organizers who embody intimate ecological knowledge to create public education on local land history. Nailah explores performance art that weaves together personal reflection, theory, song and dance into dynamic engagement with public audiences.