Nicole Eboni is a curator-artist, scholar with over twenty-years interpreting, maintaining, and protecting objects of historical and aesthetic importance primarily in museums, libraries, and private collections aesthetic. Nicole has acquired many skills in the fine art profession, ranging from archives and research to curatorial and art-handling practices. Her knowledge fosters from a wide range of skills in studio arts, as an undergraduate in fine arts focusing drawing & design, this knowledge has fostered Nicole an connection between the audience and the art.
Utilizing her fine art degree, Nicole has experience in many departments in galleries and museums. Participating while demonstrating her expertise, she has assisted in the art handling and exhibition design of art fairs, gallery exhibitions, and museums, all while gaining professional experience in procurement and liaising.
Nicole holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Old Dominion University and a Masters in Art History and Visual Culture from Lindenwood University. Her scholarship consists of how portraiture and figurative art played an important role in documenting and discovering the Black American experience, specifically during the Civil Rights Movement.
Coined in the 1960s, the Black Arts Movement started during the Civil Rights era. Black artists, such as Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Joyce Scott Barkley Hendricks, Jacob Lawrence, and many more shared their life experiences through art, whether it was in a figurative form such as Benny Andrews and his political series or those portraits taken by Barkley Hendricks only to be turned into life-size portraits in oil paints.
This movement of portraiture in Black art shaped how we see Black bodies in artwork today, specifically in contemporary art. Kara Walker and her Black and White silhouette depicting the slave era, Simone Leigh in her ceramic bust representing Black American women, and Amy Sherald created life-size portraits of Black figures, demonstrating almost how Barkley Hendricks portrayed his subjects in everyday life scenes.
The research she has conducted and continues to explore has given insight into how we see the Black body today. She hopes that this will bring more exposure to Black artists and discourse between portraiture and figurative art.