FLORIDA PRIZE IN CONTEMPORARY ART 2026 at ORLANDO MUSEUM OF ART
/I am so honored to be selected as a finalist for the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, presented by the Orlando Museum of Art. My solo exhibition “Way Up Along” opened at OMA in June, featuring works from 2017 up until the present. Also featured in the main atrium and throughout the public areas between galleries, were some of my large tapestries and my sun installation “Remember Me” is still featured on the museum’s facade right by the entrance. A personal milestone in my career, I felt very proud to represent Miami alongside some beloved peers, and to be a standout in the state where I went to your average public high school art program in a rural area. My teachers and parents have made so much of this possible and it was very special to have them at the opening.
Photo by zaire Aranguren
Curator Katherine Page wrote a beautiful text about my exhibition, I’d like to share here:
The Ties that Bind by Katherine Page
Jessy Nite creates sculptural, shadow, and fiber art to explore layered concepts of meaning and communication through text-based art in shared spaces. Her installations prompt reflection and pause through simple yet enigmatic words and phrases that invite dialogue and evoke memories, catalyzing both universal and individual understandings of her work. The interplay of light and shadow that illuminates, elongates, or erases the text serves as a metaphor for how perception and meaning-making shift in the viewer’s mind. Using manufactured materials that resist decay, such as treated metal and paracord, Nite asks viewers to consider survival, resilience, and preservation across the natural, social, and art-historical worlds.
Upon entering Nite’s gallery, the viewer is immediately immersed in a luminous environment that echoes the soft light of a Miami sunrise. As the viewer moves through the space, the apricot hue conjures dreams of a sun-kissed paradise and evokes notions of intimacy and the body. These concepts become tangible in the bold phrases Beneath Your Light and My Paradise (2021), which float onto the delectable walls in a dropped shadow. Nite’s intentional use of immersive color and shadow elicits a joyful psychological response in the viewer. Installed indoors, Nite’s phrases feel eternal in the museum context. Imagining their evolution under the harsh sun outdoors, the emotive effect, legibility, and visibility of her expressions become tied to the movement of light and the passage of time, inviting another layer of examination and reflection on their meaning.
Suspended in the center of the gallery is Nite’s monumental sculpture, Land’s End (2026). This experimental vessel is the artist’s most recent translation of her paracord textiles. Paracord is a vibrant synthetic material that is water-, mold-, mildew-, and UV-resistant, making it far more durable than the natural fibers used in textile production throughout human history. Nite integrates traditional woven basketry methods with her own knotting techniques to create a pliable, curving structure. She transitions the strands from an intricate, dense, solid apricot weave at the mouth to an irregular, unraveling netted pattern in green, then in purple toward the base. Nite places the basketry and its title at the edge of a landscape like the city of Miami, where the water is ever rising. The separated threads are reminiscent of textiles that survive only in scant traces in the archaeological record, sometimes even protected by submersion. The artist has created a permeable container to channel light and thought through the form, inviting an open-ended consideration of the preservation of material and craft.
Three of Nite’s large textiles are also integrated throughout the museum. Each features an aspirational word, woven into meditatively bound tapestries with artist-designed typography constructed through mathematical formulae and derived from survival knots. In Retreat, an energetic green cord and two types of knots are used to depict and encircle the word like a warning sign or emergency button, whichever the viewer may need. Retreat suggests survival through refuge or withdrawal, safety or evacuation – Nite’s practice looms on these double entendres. Endure (2023) signals resilience and resistance, while Siempre (2023), Always, suggests preservation and continuity – both in a delicate, hopeful, spiraling script. These one-word messages to the viewer symbolize the artist's call to care for oneself and one's community, tending the ties that bind and holding meaning together.
