We were lucky to catch up with Nicole Leth recently and have shared our conversation below.
Nicole, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
The most meaningful project I’ve worked on so far would have to be a project where I put a series of 400 billboards up around the country in September 2019 in support of Suicide Prevention Month. This was such a special moment for me because I had only just put up my first ever anonymous affirmation billboard a few months before and it was so surreal to see my one small, anonymous act of kindness grow into something that reached every corner of the country and was experienced by millions of people. I remember really wanting to take the time to experience this project, so that I could really understand and see and feel the places and the people it was impacting — so I took the month off of work and drove around the country to see as many of these 400 billboards as I could. This project has always been linked to my own personal healing, so going on this roadtrip and sitting in front of these billboards in real life was extremely impactful for me. The most moving things that happened along the way were the countless people I connected with while just standing in front of the billboards and looking at them. People would walk up or drive by and comment on how much they loved the billboard, how much the messages on them had helped them, and occasionally share something that they were working through in their own lives. They had no idea I was the person who had put up all the billboards and that those were the words I wrote because I needed to hear those words, too. They just thought I was a stranger. I never told them I was behind the billboards, I just stood there and listened and talked and connected with them. It was so special.
This specific project would later go on to win an Obie award in 2020, which is a lifetime achievement award in advertising that has changed the world.
I will forever think of this installment of my work as one of the most meaningful.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’m Nicole! I’m a 29 year old artist and writer newly living and working in Los Angeles! I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa and found art and writing as a way to survive and process a traumatic childhood from a young age. I got my professional creative training while attending college at the Kansas City Art Institute and majored in Textiles while simultaneously working every job in the clothing industry and creating my own brand. I independently opened my first brick and mortar clothing store for my brand Sex + Ice Cream in Los Angeles at 22 and then went on to open two more locations in Kansas City and Des Moines over the next few years. At the age of 25, I had turned Sex + Ice Cream into a chain of stores spanning multiple states, employed a staff of 15+ employees, and designed clothes and products that were sold around the world. In 2018, at the peak of my company’s success and growth, I stepped away after realizing I was deeply unhappy, burnt out, and had lost myself. I closed my stores, went to therapy, and deleted all social media forever.
In my healing, I found myself returning to an art project I had started in 2010 after losing my father to suicide. In this project, I would drive around my hometown and paint words of affirmation and compassion in unexpected places, anonymously. It had always been something I did for myself that no one else knew about, something that helped me heal and process things happening in my life. Slowly, in 2019, I started edging back into this art practice. I started writing statements of compassion and affirmation and leaving them around cities anonymously on stickers, posters, and postcards. It felt purposeful to do this work after nearly a decade of creating things that were for sale or for social approval on Instagram — I wanted to do something that was free, anonymous, and offered love for loves sake. In June 2019, I saved my paychecks from my job I was working at the time and rented a billboard near downtown Kansas City. On it, I shared an affirmation I had written recently. I did not tell anybody I was doing this, I did not put my name or website or information on the billboard in anyway. Eventually after weeks of it being up and driving by it daily, I shared a photo with friends – they shared it with other friends – who posted it online, and then it went viral. The media support brought corporate attention, and through sponsorship and support from a network of donors I have been able to grow this project, “My Affirmation Project” into a totally self-sustaining and full time job that I have worked tirelessly on for over 3 years now.
Through the project I have diligently worked on writing tender yet honest poem-like affirmations and posting them artistically on road-side billboards, airplane banners, semi-trucks, barges, urban wheat-pasted posters, stickers, yard signs, hand-made quilts, fliers, and murals all over the world. I also work to create iterations of this work that humans can engage directly with in an intimate way – I have built “free flower shops” in public spaces and created a mailing service in which 60,000 people have received hand-addressed postcards with my written affirmations on them every month for over two years. Through this project, it is my goal to support community mental health by integrating compassion into public spaces in free, accessible, and unexpected ways.
I have posted over 600 anonymous affirmation billboards so far, in addition to hundreds of other tangible integrations of visual compassion, and this work has been seen by over 60 million people world-wide.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
I think a big thing non-creatives, but honestly most people in general, struggle to understand about my creative journey and work is why I’ve decided to structure it the way I have. I get a ton of smirks, judgements, and diminutive comments when I tell people that my project is not-for-profit and not-for-social-media. And to be honest? I totally understand where they are coming from. Culturally, the current programming is very influenced by success paradigms related to money and social validation via social media. There is a lot of pressure for business owners, artists, and people in general to fit their goals to meet those social norms.
I constantly get my credibility questioned when doing work with My Affirmation Project because people can’t find an Instagram with a sizable following tied to it. They think I’m crazy for not selling t-shirts with “You are enough” printed on them in cute fonts. They want me to put my handle on all my billboards. Seriously, hundreds of people have encouraged me to do this — I’m constantly having to explain to them that I’m not clueless, I’m not naive — I’m doing it this way on purpose, I’m doing this intentionally. I could start printing an Instagram handle on my billboards and postcards tomorrow and I’d have a million followers by the end of this year. I just don’t want to. I don’t want to do that because my purpose is to integrate free compassion and mental health support into our communities, not to profit from it or use it for social clout. I want to challenge the idea that success only means one thing. I want to open up to conversation for more people to tap into what their true definition of success and purpose is.
To answer the question directly, I want people to know that they get to choose what success means to them. I want them to know that if it looks different from what popular culture thinks success looks like, that is okay. Their work is not less valid. And also, I want to say — if what you want out of your work is to make money and be seen on social media, that is okay too. I just want people to know that they get to choose for themselves, and that nobody is wrong.
That being said, if you do decide your version of success is something non-monetary and not-for-social-media, I think that is when things get super interesting. Radically accepting what makes you feel successful opens the doorway you for you to think newly and creatively about how to support yourself in ethical ways through your work. For me — not-profiting off of mental health but still supporting myself as a creative to continue doing the work means applying for a lot of grants, corporate sponsorships, commissioned custom design work, etc. My goal is to keep my work free for the public to consume out in the world, and once I understood that I was able to understand how I could find support myself.
Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
GRANTS! I wish I knew about grants. Please, if you are a creative of any kind, a business owner, or just a person doing cool things out in the world — please, please, please do me a favor and just take a look at what available grants there are. Corporations, government, cities, and foundations all have percentages of money the want to give to creatives every year. Sometimes they want to hire you to work on specific projects, but other times they just want to give you money to support the work you’re already doing. Create an account on callforentry.com or search available grants in your area! (haha, also this is not sponsored but it definitely sounds like it is an ad for CaFE.com — I’m just someone who only learned about grants in the last few years and my life has changed! I want everyone to know!)
Contact Info:
- Website: myaffirmationproject.com
Image Credits
Nate Watters, Joe H., Caroline Adams