About
Elisabeth Nicula is an artist whose internet-based projects combine sculpture, photography, video, drawings, and text. Her essays about art and nature have appeared in Momus, Small Press Traffic’s The Back Room, SFMOMA’s Open Space, New Life Quarterly Magazine, PAPER Magazine, and elsewhere. She amassed over 100,000 photographs of two California scrub jays over a five-year period of deep observation and friendship. Smooth Friend is her small press for publishing new short fiction and poetry online and in pamphlet-style books. San Francisco Review of Whatever is a second publication, coming in 2024, for critical writing on art and other subjects. She was born in Norfolk, Virginia and currently lives in San Francisco.
Contact
Send inquiries to hi@elisabethnicula.com.
Newsletter
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Selected Projects
Publishing
Smooth Friend, 2021–
San Francisco Review of Whatever, coming in 2024
Writing
"A Body That's All Surface," The Back Room, 2024
"We're Alive, Pablo is Dead," Momus, 2023
"In the Clear Stream of All of It," Screen Slate, 2023
"Bad Reviews," Momus, 2023
"The Artist Is the Void," Momus, 2022
Poems in As of Late IV, 2022
"A Figure That Decomposes," "Ghost Story," and "Notes From Our Last Meeting," a three-part residency for SFMOMA's Open Space, 2021
"The Dart," Facility Magazine, 2021
"Frank's Corpus," SFMOMA's Open Space, 2021
"Culture Diary: Elisabeth Nicula," niͥghͪᴛⷮliͥfeͤ, 2020
"Under the Road," Silica Magazine, 2020
"March 27, 2020," in Urgency Reader 2, and reprinted in 25 From Urgency Reader 2 for the Brooklyn Art Book Fair, Queer.Archive.Work, 2020
Living Room Light Exchange Season 6 Survey, in Rare Earth: The Ground is Not Digital, 2020
"Have You Seen This Bird," New Life Quarterly, 2019
"NATUREGIFMANIFESTO," Living Room Light Exchange Issue 02, State Change, 2017
"Artist Elisabeth Nicula's New Collection on 'Climate Anxiety'," PAPER Magazine, 2016
"Aspects of Geological Time," instructions for assembling a paper GIF, Living Room Light Exchange Issue 01, 2016
Web-based Artworks
WWWWEB.SITE, 2023–
Still Life with Void and Observer, for the je délire pavilion in the Wrong Biennale, curated by Andres Manniste, Joyce Yahouda, and Laurent Bouchard, 2023
Cultivation, for the Art was only a substitute for the internet pavilion in the Wrong Biennale, curated by Andres Manniste, 2021–2022
"Under the Road," Silica Magazine, 2020
abjectsubli.me, 2019–
frank.fan, 2019–
Miss You, for the Peregrination pavilion in the Wrong Biennale, curated by Andres Manniste, 2019–2020
dioramas.space, supported by a grant from Rhizome, 2018–2020
"Dioramas," SFMOMA's Open Space, 2017
"California," Silica Magazine, 2017
Aspects of Geological Time (multi-part project), 2016–2017
geologicaltime.net, for Internet! A Retrospective, San Francisco, CA, 2016
Predictions, for Electric Objects, 2016
Works on Newhive (archived), 2013–2017
Physical Artworks
Already Underwater, Black & White Projects, San Francisco, CA, 2019
Dioramas, at Black & White Projects, San Francisco, CA, 2017
Sense Memories (multi-part project), 2015–2016
Where (multi-part project), 2014–2015
Lectures and Talks
Guest speaker, Too Much Information, Problem Library, San Francisco, CA, 2024
Guest lecture, Art and Architecture Colloquium, University of San Francisco, CA, 2022
Guest speaker, The Virtual Void: An Open Conversation, with Erica Molesworth and Fred Scharmen, in Judit Navratil's VR Art Camp, 2022 (video)
Guest speaker, Information Maintainers, 2022 (video)
Reading "Have You Seen This Bird," and discussion with Jordan Karnes, Wolfman New Life Quarterly Issue 6 release party, Beauty Supply Arts, Oakland, CA, 2020
Visual lecture, Tidewater, PLACE TALKS, Prelinger Library, San Francisco, CA, 2019
Guest lecture, Liat Berdugo's Copy Culture class, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, 2019
Guest speaker, Living Room Light Exchange, with Sanaz Mazinani, Beth Stephens, and Annie Sprinkle, Oakland, CA, 2018
Readings and Art for the Human and Non-human Worlds, with Kate Schapira, Javier Arbona, and Maya Weeks, E. M. Wolfman, Oakland, CA, 2017
Reading "NATUREGIFMANIFESTO," Living Room Light Exchange Issue 02, State Change release party, with Rick Prelinger, Blinkpopshift, and Joe Veix, The Thing Quarterly, San Francisco, CA, 2017