Niki's profile
(b. Chicago) Niki Clark is an American artist and writer who lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Fusing art and prose, her abstract and figure paintings focus on the feminine form, taking shape from kinetic and repetitive graffiti script. Her collage work utilizes paper artifacts from her past to construct poignant, satirical designs about the female experience.
Raised in Chicago in the '80s and '90s, her work imitates the cultural paradoxes from late twentieth-century American culture: cross-colors and grunge, analog-meets-digital, hope and fatalism, nostalgia and acceptance. Clark captures these dualities in her art and writing through a laborious layering process, setting down thick coats of paint, images, and words to create storied textures and stories with texture. Clark’s commitment to shadow work – a process of exploring and integrating the parts of ourselves that we've repressed or ignored – facilitates her navigation of paradoxical ideas and ability to create visual and literary manifestations of her psyche. These manifestations of art and prose, in turn, become invitations to viewers and readers to explore the contradictions of their own interior life.
Her art has been collected and exhibited in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago in solo and group exhibitions. Her writing has been featured in Bmore Art and MICA’s Velocity and Commotion magazines. Alongside her art and writing practice, she works as a creative consultant specializing in change management and ghostwriting. She earned her BA in political science and journalism (2005) and her Change Management Advanced Practitioner certificate from Georgetown University (2011).
