News and Updates

May 20224

I took nearly a 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 just weeks away 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 the hollow in 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, like Elise’s, begin to triangulate in my studio. Stay tuned!

I’m also heading to the South of France in June with nine wonderful high school students and a fabulous colleague. I have never experienced that landscape and that kind of very specific light and I cannot wait to see how it will inspire me.

You can check out my most recent exhibition information below, including press updates. 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.

- Nikki

Pulse 2023 opens January 6. This is a group exhibition with selected works of the Advisory Counsel for Hillyer International Arts & Artists. i will be exhibiting three works of art, including one new, never exhibited piece inspired by a recent trip to Asheville, NC.

https://athillyer.org/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 this Spring:

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

2022 Notable Exhibitions

Nikki 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/