Press Releases Seattle Artist Deycha Nhtae Explores Food as Culture in Northwest Harvest’s Latest #ArtistsForFoodJustice Collaboration May 7, 2025 Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Share on Email Food is Culture spotlights how culinary traditions preserve identity, resist erasure, and nourish community across generations. SEATTLE, Wash. (May 7, 2025)— Northwest Harvest is proud to feature Seattle-based visual artist Deycha Nhtae (she/they) as the May collaborator in its #ArtistsForFoodJustice series—part of the yearlong campaign The Meaning of Food, a community-driven exploration of how food shapes identity, connection, and justice. This month’s conversation theme, Food is Culture, invites the public to consider food not just as nourishment, but as memory, migration, resistance, and ritual. Through original artwork, storytelling, and educational resources, the theme underscores the vital role that food plays in individual and collective well-being—especially for communities historically marginalized in food systems. Interpreting this month’s theme through her unique lived experience and artistic lens is Deycha Nhtae, a queer, Black visual artist and survivor whose work fuses abstraction and collage to explore ancestral memory, generational trauma, and cultural reclamation. Born and raised in Southeast D.C. and now based in Seattle, Nhtae’s art is a radical expression of embodiment, rooted in the rituals of community and identity. Her commissioned piece for Northwest Harvest reflects how food traditions become sacred through repetition, storytelling, and shared experience—particularly in diasporic and displaced communities. “My abstract still life addresses a memory of the sustenance that pickled eggs and sunflower seeds provided in low-income projects in Washington, D.C.,” says Nhtae. “This is an element of ghetto food culture that nourished me when the industrial food system and manufactured inequity left our neighborhoods desolate of whole and less processed food.” Hear Deycha Nhtae discuss the experiences that informed their process in creating their piece for Food is Culture > “It’s important to contextualize this as a rupture from our connection to land stewardship as original co-developers of the land of the US (along with the original Indigenous stewards since time immemorial),” Nhtae continues. “My goal is to highlight the issue while shedding beautiful, reverential light on the ways we adapted to feed ourselves well despite it all.” #ArtistsForFoodJustice highlights creators whose work amplifies the intersections of food, equity, and culture. Each month of 2025, Northwest Harvest collaborates with a new Washington-based BIPOC artist to explore each of the monthly themes from the Meaning of Food campaign. The campaign itself comes at a critical time: food insecurity remains a persistent challenge in Washington and nationwide, with Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities facing disproportionate barriers. Northwest Harvest works to provide immediate food assistance while also addressing hunger at its roots. Part of that effort requires shifting the narrative—broadening understanding that hunger results not from poor choices but from inequitable systems. Learn more and get involved: View Deycha Nhtae’s interpretation of Food Is Culture. Community members can record and share their own Food is Culture stories at northwestharvest.org/meaning-of-food. Media requests: High-resolution artwork and artist interviews available upon request. Media interested in following this yearlong community dialogue or partnering on sustained coverage can contact Zomi Anderson at ZomiA@northwestharvest.org or 772-924-8555. About The Artist Deycha Nhtae is a self-taught, multidisciplinary visual artist, teacher, and cultural worker. Her abstract figurative work draws on ancestral memory and the revolutionary spirit of Ghetto culture. They teach at Pratt Fine Arts Center and has collaborated with the Seattle Art Museum and Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. About Northwest Harvest Northwest Harvest is an anti-racist, anti-oppression organization committed to transforming an unjust food system into one that is more responsive and accountable to the communities most impacted by discrimination. In addition to distributing food to more than 350 partners throughout Washington state, Northwest Harvest aims to shift public opinion, as well as impact institutional policies and societal practices that perpetuate hunger, poverty, and disparities in our state. www.northwestharvest.org ###
