Nicole Awai

Nicole Awai was born in 1966 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. She received her MA degree in Multimedia Art from the University of South Florida in 1996 and  attended the Showhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency in 1997. She was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2000 and was a featured artist in the 2005 Initial Public Offerings series at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary, Kansas City, MO; Portland Museum of Art; Delaware Art Museum; Philip Frost Art Museum FIU, Miami; the Vilcek Foundation and the Biennale of the Caribbean in Aruba. She was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2011 and an Art Matters Grant in 2012. Awai was a Critic at the Yale School of Art in the Department of Painting and Printmaking from 2009-2015 and is currently faculty in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Austin, Texas.

Work in the exhibition: 

Nicole Awai, The Spirit of Persistent Resistance of the Liquid Land, 2018. Nail polish, resin, ink, graphite, and paper collage on inkjet print, 11 x 17 inches. Courtesy the artist, Lesley Heller Gallery, and the New York Times. Original photograph by Tamir Kalifa for the New York Times.