NICOLE AWAI
Nicole Awai is a multimedia artist who is based in Brooklyn, NY and grew up in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Awai thinks about painting in an expansive way. She makes nebulous 3-D resin paintings, mixed media sculptures, installations and drawings that are conceptual abstractions, often consisting of an amalgam of representational elements. She uses such materials as nail polish to paint and as signifiers.
Awai believes that the history of the Americas is about malleability, the shaping and reshaping of resources and culture. In her work nothing is fixed, things are always shifting, especially ‘meaning’. She acknowledges that we seldom really question the cannons, the codes and the terms through which we have learned to see the world. Awai is interested in art that creates a more acute awareness of HERE – our present/ presence, transcending location, navigating a path through and even beyond identity.
Awai is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painting and Sculpture, an Art Matters Grant, a Puffin Foundation Grant and an inaugural BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize. Awai was a Resident Faculty Artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 2024.Her work has been exhibited at such venues as PS1 MOMA, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Kemper Museum, Museum of Latin American Art, California African American Museum, the Biennale of Ceramic in Contemporary Art, the Busan Biennale and the Vilcek Foundation. Her solo exhibition Nicole Awai: In the thick of it at the Christian-Green Gallery, University of Texas at Austin (2024) was a selection of works from the previous 20 years of her practice.
