NIKKI LUNA

ARTIST/ACTIVIST

WHERE DOES ONE EVEN BEGIN WITH NIKKI LUNA?

Her work has broken records at Sotheby’s and yet during the creative process, making a profit is the last thing on her mind. She admits to having lived a sheltered life and yet she champions several causes, among them women’s rights, and housing and she rehabilitates abused woman via the Start Art program. “I used to think I wasn’t a feminist until I realized that, yeah, I am one,” shares Nikki over lunch. “There’s just this misconception that if you’re a feminist you hate men and you’re unattractive.” Clearly, Nikki is neither.

Through her brainchild, the Start Art program, Nikki uses art as a language to heal victims of abuse. Her program attendees included the children of the victims of the Ampatuan massacre, who to this day, have not been served justice. To engage Nikki in a conversation is to come face-to-face with sobering truths: of young women who get raped, of friends who flee to the mountains (yes, even in this day and age) and of how supposedly “empowering” imagery can be untruths.

“They [the rebels] can’t touch me because I have friends in the media,” shares Nikki when asked about the perils of going to Maguindanao, and of being a woman at that. Two friends of hers did not have as much luck and Nikki knows it. She channels all of this—her sorrow, her anger, her contemplations into art that uses old children’s clothes and fiberglass-enforced eggshells. What Nikki uses is of as much importance as her message. Although a painter by training, she uses everyday objects to represent domestic abuse and female stereotypes.

In her newest exhibit entitled “Beat,” Nikki takes on Hacienda Luisita and the decades-long injustice suffered by its farmers. Her medium includes gold, soil and bone china and a sound installation. It is dedicated to indigenous people and communities and how their fates are, in no small way, tied to the earth.

Regardless of the medium, Nikki likes to put her art where her heart is.—MY