Heather Nickels

Heather Nickels

Heather Nickels is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, as well as an independent curator, arts writer and consultant. Presently, she is a Consulting Project Associate for the forthcoming exhibition, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in February 2024. In December 2023, Nickels was selected to present a paper on the presence (and lack thereof) of domestic workers and servants in eighteenth century French painting and the state of the contemporary museum period room at the Eighteenth Century Studies annual seminar, “New Eyes on the Eighteenth Century XIV,” housed at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. 

From 2019-2022, she served as the inaugural Blackmon Perry Curatorial Fellow in African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (MBMA) in Memphis, Tennessee (previously titled the Joyce Blackmon Curatorial Fellowship). In this role, she organized several exhibitions, most notably “Persevere and Resist: The Strong Black Women of Elizabeth Catlett” (June 5 - August 29, 2021), which was accompanied by a full-illustrated catalogue. The catalogue, which included an essay by Nickels and Catlett biographer Dr. Melanie Herzog, was reviewed in the June 2023 volume of Print Quarterly by esteemed art historian Dr. Lisa Farrington. This project received significant funding and support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, and two short videos were produced in conjunction with and related to the project, one of which has received over one million views online to-date. At the Brooks, she also organized a small, permanent collection show entitled, “A Journey Towards Self-Definition: African American Artists in the Permanent Collection”; and was a site curator for the traveling exhibition “Andy Warhol: Silver Clouds” and the one-work exhibition and short-term loan project from Art Bridges, The Thankful Poor by Henry Ossawa Tanner. She provided research and writing support to additional curatorial projects in her role, and ushered in over twenty new acquisitions in her three- year fellowship, one of the most notable being the Afro-Cuban American painter Harmonia Rosales’ monumental Migration of the Gods (2021). 

Since commencing the Ph.D program in Fall 2022, Nickels has written essays for in-person and virtual exhibitions in commercial galleries and arts foundations, edited art historical texts for online publications and projects, provided research support to artists and institutional curators, and has contributed to Columbia’s Media Center for Art History’s cataloguing project, Illuminating Art History: Kress Foundation Digital Art History Grant.

Several years prior, she completed a two-year project research associateship (2016-2018) at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, where she worked on traveling exhibition "Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today" (which later traveled to the Orsay Museum in Paris, France), and held a one-year curatorial position in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from September 2016 to September 2017.

She graduated cum laude from Barnard College of Columbia University in May 2016 with a major in Art History, and completed her M.A. with Distinction in the History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, U.K. in 2019. She has extensive professional experience in arts non-profits, for-profit institutions and in the fashion design industry.