Nicole Macdonald
Nicole Macdonald is a muralist and installation artist in Detroit who focuses on city history and neighborhood empowerment in her work. She has made large‐scale public installations for the past ten years as part of an ongoing series featuring city luminaries called “Detroit Portrait Series.” In the past she was co-director of the Detroit Film Center, and worked with the Prison Creative Arts Project, where she led workshops focused on visual arts for incarcerated women and juveniles at detention centers in Southeast Michigan.
Her film work includes documentaries on the Detroit environment and have won Best Michigan Filmmaker at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Documentary at Humboldt Film Festival, and the John Michaels Filmmaker Award for Social Activism and Community Empowerment at the Big Muddy Film Festival, and have screened at Harlem International, and Full Frame film festivals.
Her documentary on development in the Cass Corridor neighborhood of Detroit, Last Days of Chinatown, played at festivals around the country, and screened on PBS in 2019. She completed a 200’ hand-painted mural as a tribute to the bull-dozed Paradise Valley neighborhood in Detroit in July 2021 and will begin a companion piece in the fall of 2022. She works with the neighborhood group Northwest Goldberg Cares to develop portraits of local people, some of which were installed in that Detroit neighborhood in July 2022.
In the fall of 2021 she completed an artist residency in Abruzzo Italy working with local people to make art in a traditional Abruzzese ceramics method and do art workshops with refugees. She was ultimately there to study the way people thrive in a declining population and their (sustaining) relationship with the land.
You can learn more about Macdonald’s upcoming exhibition at Chalfonte here. To learn more about Macdonald check out her website.
