News and Updates

June 2025

I took nearly two year off of my own studio practice to dedicate my attention to my rapidly growing and changing teenager, as well as my teaching. My need and desire to innovate projects is palpable and I’m driven to give my students prompts that push them to think critically, as well as creatively. Summer is nearly here and so is dedicated time in my studio! I’m excited for intentions to become actions, and I’m including an image that has been inspiring me, for months. I can’t stop thinking about the idea of SHEDDING, as well as THE HOLLOW OF THE HAND, as well as all of the different hands in my life and the various functions they perform. Hands are literally on the studio horizon and I’m excited to see the way very specific hands, including my own, begin to triangulate in my studio.

I’m also heading to the UK in July with family. I hope to be inspired by new [old] places that I’ve been learning about forever.

I hope to post exhibition updates for the upcoming year in the next few months. I need to get cracking on new work and get those proposals written. Thanks for following along.

- Nikki

Most recent/notable exhibitions:

Here is a wonderful interview published in the Modern Love blog about the relationship between and nature of collaboration in the creative process between Anne C Smith and myself:

https://www.modlovblog.com/blog/annecsmithnikkibrugnoli

And, for anyone interested in learning about my teaching philosophy, here is a little teacher spotlight my school published last Spring:

https://www.flinthill.org/news/teacher-spotlight-nikki-brugnoli-upper-school-art/

2022 Notable Exhibitions

I was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Trawick Prize.

Forces Fleeting was a mixed-media exhibition of new works by artists Nikki Brugnoli and Anne C. Smith, in the first joint installation by the two longtime friends and collaborators. In very different ways, both women explore the transformative power of landscape, with Brugnoli’s gestural screenprint drawings on mylar and wood panels and Smith’s dark pencil drawings on stained linen. Each artist mines and abstracts the shapes they associate with the landscape of home, from Pittsburgh to Northern Virginia (Brugnoli) and Syracuse to Washington, DC (Smith). They hone in on specific elements of those landscapes – a water tower, a horizon line – forms that enable their studio practice to become meditations on stillness, memory, life’s rhythms and transitions, and loss. The works are primarily dark, and largely monochromatic with sweeping areas of carbon-black ink, while key moments of color shimmer and emerge inside the shadowy forms held in remembered or imagined spaces.

Please check out the review in the April 1, 2022 edition of the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/04/01/art-gallery-shows-dc-area/

Suspended Inter-Space

VisArts presented Suspended Inter-Space with 18 artists revealing the ways that they immerse themselves in a space between the origin of their creative vision to its final completed presentation.

During the suspended time of creation, these artists explored rituals that transform their routine studio practice.  Whether the ritual is directed by linear, kinesthetic, or simultaneous impulses, it usually propels the act of making from a deep personal level, perhaps from the unconscious to the conscious, or the perceptual to the conceptual, or the profane to the sacred, or superstition/mythical to reality.

Artists often times use every day seemingly insignificant ceremonies as mechanisms for guided observation, enriched discovery, and notational research to offer a new flow of ideas into their studio practice. It may be that a starting point is so challenging, or that the gathered research so overpowering that steps to organize and impel the act of making come into play from a remembered place, or perhaps a new place of discovery.

The exhibition intended to bring together the varied group of artists in three gallery spaces, to ultimately broaden the traceries of human experience. It will feature a selected grouping of media including two and three -dimensional objects, performance, sound, and video that call upon surrealistic qualities, superstition, vigil, tension, polarities, and sacred practices.

VisArts, Rockville, MD

Please check out the review in the April 25th edition of East City Arts:

https://www.eastcityart.com/reviews/east-city-art-reviews-suspended-inter-spaces-at-visarts/