Nydia Blas was born in Ithaca, New York — a place where she raised two children before it pushed her south. A place her family has lived for over one hundred years. Inside a china cabinet in that world, behind a twisted key and fragile heirlooms, lived a photograph of Alice. Her skin light. Her eyes almost black — deep, gentle, innocent. Alice always looked like she knew something.

Alice Martin was murdered by a man, an axe lodged in her head, in front of her mother, Cora B. Jackson. She and Blas were born seventy-eight years apart. They stand together now. Alice wields the axe in her left hand — it has become an extension of her body. She protects fiercely.

Blas's practice is built from this inheritance. Working across photography, collage, video, and books, she creates physical and allegorical spaces presented through a Black feminine lens — delicately weaving stories of circumstance, value, and power. Her work addresses sexuality, intimacy, and the lived experience of being a girl, a woman, a mother of Afro-Panamanian descent in America. It holds the names of the women who came before her. It documents the men who have failed to end her. It insists on survival not as exception but as lineage — sweet baby angels, two mischievous girls, laughing and playing in the Ithaca dirt.