We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nicole Davis. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nicole below.

Hi Nicole, thanks for joining us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

I sometimes wonder how my life would be different if I had started my creative career earlier. I have always been creative but growing up I didn’t see it as a career option. I chose to become a Special Education teacher instead. I taught for twenty-one years in public school systems. By middle age, I longed for something different, but felt stuck in the life I had built for myself. After a series of unexpected events, I found a path toward change. I resigned from my job and moved back to my hometown. I started taking art classes at the community college and a team of professors encouraged me to pursue an MFA degree. I put together a portfolio, applied to schools, and was accepted into a three year MFA program for Drawing and Painting. I finished my degree a few months into the Covid-19 shutdown, not a good time to be starting anew! Now though, I am a professor at a community college and maintain a studio practice, working mostly with textiles. It was an eight year journey from Special Education teacher to Artist and Educator, but I feel like my entire life has been all about coming into this moment and version of myself. So, I wonder, how would life be different had I come to this moment sooner?

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a visual artist and educator based in Illinois. I work primarily in textile, photography, and painting. My work is rooted in Black feminist practice, memory, and identity. The work calls upon personal, ancestral, and cultural memory as a form of sustenance and resistance in opposition to current societal structures of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Drawing attention to marginalized voices and challenging harmful power structures allows me to tell a story that is different than the one larger society declares as truth. The reclaimed textiles used in my artwork are cut, torn, dyed, and sewn to create the artwork that you see. The pieces materialize through the process of breaking down and marrying discarded textiles to create new ones. In this return from the margin to the center of life, they affirm their importance and beauty as well as challenge their relegated place in the shadows. The work is meant to embody the past/present/future, evoke memory, and provide commentary. The pieces contain prayers and protection from the violent power structures that dominate society. In this moment of history and time, we are being broken down in ways we never expected. It is my sincerest hope that through this process of breaking that humankind will rise-up and materialize something beautiful.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I have had to unlearn “respectability politics” and the idea that I am required to show up a certain way, dictated systems of oppression, to be valued as a human being. I also had to unlearn the myth of “perfection” and the idea that it is something desirable and achievable. Art school is where these ideas came to a head for me. I was bombarded with information in classes and critiques that really didn’t interest or resonate with me in relation to my lived experience. Immersing myself in Black feminist literature was my key to understanding that my lived experience and the things passed to me through blood are as, if not more so, legitimate than anything being taught in my classes or printed in the material I was required to study. I have learned through this unlearning and through my current art practice that working intuitively and drawing upon embodied knowledge is a legitimate way of creating and being in the world.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

For me, the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is using art as a tool to make sense of the world around me and helping others to do the same. Creating and viewing art is a place of refuge and healing for me and I believe it can be so for others as well. I feel honored to be an educator and create safe space for students to express themselves in authentic ways. The fact that I get to wake up every day now and talk about and create art for a living blows my mind. I am happy that I have been able to circle back and bring this aspect of myself to the forefront once again and be my most authentic self.

Contact Info:

• Website: nicoledavisart.com
• Instagram: @nicoledavisart

Image Credits
All images by Nicole Davis