Location: San Anselmo, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Installation, Books and prints
Website: tuckernichols.com
Tucker Nichols was born in 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned a BA in the History of Art with a focus on China from Brown University in 1993, followed by an MA in East Asian Studies: Chinese Painting from Yale University in 1998. He lives and works in San Anselmo, in Marin County, and has been a fixture of the Northern California arts community for more than two decades.
Nichols has exhibited at major institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, the Drawing Center in New York, the Denver Art Museum, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Den Frie Museum in Copenhagen. He participated in the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. In 2010 he was a California Visual Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and in 2021 he was elected an Artist Trustee at SFMOMA.
Nichols works across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and artist books. His compositions—rendered in acrylic, oil, enamel, gouache, and ink—carry the casual clarity of mid-century modern design inflected with quirky formalism and bittersweet humor. Recurring subjects include flowers, social space, and the textures of daily life. His drawings and paintings have an economy of mark that reads as both effortless and precise, and his sculptures often take the form of makeshift tabletop arrangements that evoke amateur scientific experiments. He has also produced large-scale works for walls and storefront windows, and long-form serial drawings—most notably River (2003–2024), a sheetrock drawing spanning thirty-two feet.
Nichols’s practice extends into print and publishing: his illustrations have appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, McSweeney’s, and the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. During the COVID-19 pandemic he launched Flowers for Sick People, a project in which he painted small flower watercolors daily and mailed them free of charge to sick people on behalf of their loved ones; the project was featured on PBS NewsHour and sixteen original paintings from the series were included in SFMOMA’s 2021 exhibition Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis.
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