Bio
Nicole Theus (b. 1986, Berkeley, CA; lives and works in Washington, D.C.) is a painter working in abstraction, monoprint, and mixed media. Drawing on an academic foundation in Sociology and African and African American Studies, her practice engages the emotional and cultural registers of abstraction: examining how color, gesture, and layered surface can hold feeling, memory, and meaning without resolving into fixed narrative.
Theus works thoughtfully and intuitively, building compositions through accumulation and discovery. Music is central to her process: a needle dropped on a record, a playlist on shuffle, a song that ends up giving a finished piece its name. Sometimes the music shapes the painting from the first mark. Sometimes she finishes a piece and only later hears the song it was always becoming.
She grew up between the Bay Area and Monterey, California, and spent nearly a decade of her adult life in Oakland before moving to DC, a Californian at heart, through and through. A former college radio host and music podcaster, her background in the social sciences still shows up in how she thinks about identity, feeling, and meaning in visual work.
Though she has spent her professional life as an HR executive, Theus has been making art since childhood: photography, drawing, painting, creating continuously across decades. She began taking her practice seriously in college and has worked with artists and in workshops ever since. Now, after years of making work privately, she is stepping fully into public life as an artist.
Her paintings invite the kind of presence and interpretation music does; something felt before it's explained.
*As you browse her portfolio, take a look at the song associated with each piece!
Artist Statement
Abstraction has always had to fight for its place in Black American art. For much of the 20th century, the work most associated with Black identity was figurative — clear, legible, often explicitly in service of social progress. Abstract work, by contrast, asks something different of the viewer: to sit with color, gesture, and feeling without a fixed subject to resolve it into.
I make art in a lineage that includes painters like Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, and Frank Bowling, alongside Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Emily Mason, and Mark Rothko — color used as feeling, gesture as a kind of language, my work asks you to stand inside a piece rather than just look at it.
My own process includes with music. Music plays, and the painting follows. The work is built in layers, through gesture and intuition; discovery in the midst of a plan. There's structure and release, tension and resolve, meaning that arrives before it's explained.