Nicole Emanuel (born 1961) is a muralist, painter, writer, artistic director, and community arts organizer. She lived in New York City until 1980, when she went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she would study philosophy and psychology. Later, from 1982 to 1985, she studied at San Francisco State University (SFSU), where she received her bachelor’s in design and industry, with a minor in community and ethnic arts. While at SFSU in 1982, she worked in the Mission District. That year, she recounts, Chicana muralist and founding member of the Mujeres Muralistas collective Patricia Rodriguez, put a paintbrush in her hand and a mural sketch under her arm, and told Emanuel to climb a scaffold to paint. She worked as the public relations point person for the PLACA muralist collective with muralist Ray Patlán. As a muralist, she has created over twenty large-scale murals and two large-scale public sculptures. Her paintings and drawings are in numerous corporate and private collections in New York, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Missouri. In 1984 she created the no-longer extant mural Indigenous Beauty, which used to be in Balmy Alley. From 1987 through 1992 she worked with the City of San Francisco, Project Artaud, Artspace Projects-Minneapolis, and freelance. In 1992 she went to the Kansas City Art Institute, where she would earn a bachelor’s of fine arts in painting in 1995 and serve as the 1996 valedictorian. She founded InterUrban ArtHouse in Kansas in 2011.
Camilo Garzón
