Pittsburgh Creative Corps Artist Directory

Nicole Renee Ryan

Nicole Renee Ryan Studios

Primary Discipline

Environmental and landscape art
Site-specific and integrated art
2-D art, including murals, mosaic, photography, etc.

Artistic Practice

Landscape design
Murals
Painting/works on paper/printmaking

About the Artist

Nicole Renee RyanNicole Renee Ryan is a painter from Mercer, PA. Nicole paints imagined landscapes, but surprisingly, she’s not all that interested in traditional landscape paintings, instead, she uses the landscape as a means to explore the concept of memory. Her interest in the importance and fallibility of memory arose during college while getting her degree in psychology from Washington & Jefferson College.

Her goal is to recreate a place she felt she had been at but can’t quite pinpoint. As memories move from reality to abstraction, it becomes easier to misremember things, or think they may have just been a dream. This hazy area is Nicole’s source of inspiration. She uses color and shape to create ethereal landscapes that illustrate the purgatory between memory and imagination, the real and the unreal.

In 2015 Nicole was awarded a residency at the New York Student’s League at Vytacil and a fellowship at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was nominated for Pittsburgh Emerging Artist of the Year for 2016. In 2017 she was awarded a Flight School Fellowship through the Heinz Endowments. She has exhibited paintings in the Heinz History Center and The Butler Museum of American Art. Her works have been exhibited in NYC, Chicago, and Miami. Her last solo show, Land of Little Thoughts and No Worries, was hosted at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art.

Photo by Julia Reynolds – Monmade

Web

Accreditations, Certifications, and/or Awards

  • Flight School Fellowship – Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Center for the Arts, 2017;
  • Pittsburgh Emerging Artist of the Year nominee for 2016;
  • VCCA – Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship, 2015;
  • The Art Student’s League of New York Residency at Vytlacil, 2015

Provides Fabrication Services to Other Artists

No

Teaching Artist

No

Joined the Directory

May 2022

Related

PROJECT

Pittsburgh Creative Corps

Designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pittsburgh Creative Corps initiative engages artists and creative workers to activate the public realm while providing economic opportunity.

“Public art is about bringing wonder and beauty, a story, interest, or a message to a public space. It slows viewers down and enlivens the space.”

Nicole Renee Ryan

Contact the Artist

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    Related

    PROJECT

    Pittsburgh Creative Corps

    Designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pittsburgh Creative Corps initiative engages artists and creative workers to activate the public realm while providing economic opportunity.

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