In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Northern California based artist Tucker Nichols.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Today, Emily chats with NorCal based artist Tucker Nichols as he shares stories about his spontaneous move to Taiwan, where he immersed himself in a vibrant artistic community. He discusses his extensive body of work, including children's books and the initiative 'Flowers for Sick People.' He reflects on his background, including his mother’s influence and his intense study of East Asian art. Tucker's journey includes struggling with Crohn's disease and a career shift to become a full-time artist, supported by his wife. He talks about influential works and places, emphasizing his lifelong passion for art. The podcast concludes with three thought-provoking questions Emily asks every guest.
About Artist Tucker Nichols:
Tucker Nichols is an artist based in Northern California. His work has been featured at the Drawing Center in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, Den Frie Museum in Copenhagen, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. A show of his sculpture, Almost Everything On The Table, was recently on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. He is currently an Artist Trustee at SFMOMA.
His drawings have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, McSweeney's, The Thing Quarterly, and the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. He is co-author of the books, Crabtree (with Jon Nichols) and This Bridge Will Not Be Gray (with Dave Eggers). Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say was released in March 2024. Flowers for Sick People, his ongoing multimedia project, can be viewed here.
Visit Tucker's Website: TuckerNichols.com
Follow Tucker on Instagram: @TuckerNichols
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
Artist Tucker Nichols:[00:00:00] I literally don't have a plan. I'm at the airport. There was a lot of stumbling around and I eventually found my way into a community of just amazing creative weirdos who lived in the city of Taichung and just fell in with them making music and drawing on rooftops.
Host Emily Wilson: That's artist Tucker Nichols on moving to Taiwan without a plan.
Welcome to Art is Awesome. I'm your host, Emily Wilson. I'm a writer in San Francisco, often covering the arts, and I've been meeting such great people that I created this biweekly podcast to highlight their work.
Art is Awesome is now carried on KSFP LP 102. 5 FM. on [00:01:00] Fridays at 9 a. m. and 7 p. m. You can listen live or stream it there.
Along with painting, sculpting, and drawing, artist Tucker Nichols illustrates and writes books, recently releasing Flowers for things I don't know how to say. With his brother, John, he also worked on Crabtree, a children's book about an art dealer. And This Bridge Will not be Gray, another children's book, this one about the Golden Gate Bridge that he did with Dave Eggers. During the pandemic, Tucker started Flowers for Sick People, where you send him the address of a sick loved one, and he sends the person a small painting of flowers for free. Tucker is also one of eight Bay Area artists in the documentary, Tell Them We Were Here.
Tucker's work has been featured at SF MoMA, the Asian Art [00:02:00] Museum, the Drawing Center in New York, and the Denver Art Museum. His drawings have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and McSweeney's.
We met at San Francisco's Gallery 16 a few weeks ago, when his show, Someone's Cheering Somewhere, was up. We talked about why he studied East Asian art, having drawing parties and playing music on roofs in Taiwan, and being obsessed with making things. Tucker grew up with a mother who was an antique dealer, a garden designer, and a competitive flower arranger.
Artist Tucker Nichols: Just an incredible arranger of things in our home space. And so I didn't really realize growing up that most people didn't have buckets of flowers in their kitchen sink all the time, or just a [00:03:00] strange, like wooden head lying on their dining table when they sit down to dinner and she set out a lot of permission.
She had just an absolute natural knack for where things should be in relation to other things and what those things might be.
Host Emily Wilson: Tucker made art with his brother growing up.
Artist Tucker Nichols: I was like his mandatory audience for a lot of his performances, magic shows, theater things. And that went all the way into college where I was, he was dressing me up and filming me juggling eggs by the side of the highway for some reason. I don't even know why now. So yeah, there was a lot of that, but also yeah, a lot of drawing. He, he especially was a very prolific drawer of faces and like rows and rows of different kinds of career faces, a policeman, uh, kind of like a YMCA crowd policeman, a cowboy, all that.
Host Emily Wilson: In college, Tucker studied East [00:04:00] Asian art.
Artist Tucker Nichols: I started studying Chinese painting because I had taken a team taught art history class my first semester in college. And I just really liked the two-week segment that was on Chinese painting. And so I decided to take that professor's lecture and then I just kept getting deeper and deeper into it. And I took her seminar and then eventually I created my own major that had Chinese traditional Chinese painting the history of it at its center, but also had a Chinese language and religious studies and other art history and some studio classes that I was taking at RISD.
So, it was really mixed all together, but it started with just a curiosity that I didn't see coming of just sitting in a lecture hall and really feeling just strangely moved by images that were getting shown on the screen and trying to figure out. What was in them that could have possibly set something off in me.
And I still don't really know, but I think that that initial hit has remained just as strong as ever. [00:05:00]
Host Emily Wilson: After he graduated from college, Tucker planned to move to China. But that's not where he ended up.
Artist Tucker Nichols: A number of people who I knew at the time suggested that I think about going to Taiwan instead only because it was a lot easier to get an apartment, get a job, not really be as under the eye of the Chinese government, and that was just a much more open kind of experience and I had never really thought about going to Taiwan at all. And I arrived there just a month or two later after I had decided that's where I was going. And I had a friend of a friend's phone number in my pocket when I landed in Taipei. And I remember landing and just being like, wait, I, I somehow, I thought that that was great.
Like, I don't have a plan and this is going to be so great. I'm going to figure it out. It was all very romantic. And then I got there and was like, I literally don't have a plan. I'm at the airport. And I don't even know like where I'm going from the airport. Like what, so it was, it [00:06:00] was, there was a lot of stumbling around and, um, I eventually found my way into a community of just amazing creative weirdos who live in the city of Taichung, Western and Taiwanese alike, and just fell in with them making music and drawing on rooftops.
Host Emily Wilson: That made Tucker realize he wanted to be involved in making art.
Artist Tucker Nichols: I like the feeling of participating. I lived with a Taiwanese artist. And my Chinese wasn't great at the time and his English wasn't very good either. So we really communicated through making work together. We were making collaborative drawings and just sort of fumbling our way through getting to know each other.
And that kind of experience was totally new for me to explore something as complex as like an international friendship through visual culture was like, it was really fun and profound. And also like, so futile at the same time, there were things that Neither of us could really communicate very well.[00:07:00]
Host Emily Wilson: Tucker moved back to New York looking for those experiences.
Artist Tucker Nichols: First, I had a job doing art handling and that was a great way to get to know the city better and go into people's collections and handle work and pack it and all that. And then I got a job working at Asia Society as a kind of curatorial assistant and exhibition manager kind of person, all wearing lots of hats.
And through that, I did a lot of handling of their collection, which is Small, but mighty of just holding like the most precious Korean foliate bowl and just having to calm yourself down. How do you not drop a priceless ceramics when you're holding it? What kind of mindset do you need to get into in order to really guarantee that it's safe in your hands?
That's a really, that was really profound experience.
Host Emily Wilson: This experience led Tucker to go to grad school, planning to get a Ph. D. in Chinese painting. He [00:08:00] thought this would maybe lead to working in a museum and having creative input.
Artist Tucker Nichols: When I went back to school, I kind of found, oh, it's not alive in the way that I've just experienced. It felt very, not dry exactly. There's plenty there to study and uncover, but it just wasn't the track that I was on anymore. It was much more abstract and I was really looking for something that was more concrete and real and in front of me and touchable and communicable without words, honestly.
Host Emily Wilson: Something else that affected his life happened when Tucker was in grad school.
Artist Tucker Nichols: I became very sick with something called Crohn's disease. And it was super disruptive and debilitating for a while. I moved out to California having just gotten a master's and left that program. I moved out to California with the feeling of, I think I still want to do some work in museums. I want to be on the creative side.
I want to use my hands. I'm just going to keep making art in the meantime. I don't really know how this is going to work. And I [00:09:00] came out here and really was still struggling to keep a job. My health was really up and down, and it wasn't that I had a threat that I was going to die or anything like that, but it was really limiting in terms of how much free time I had, how much by free time I mean like time where I could actually be doing anything.
Host Emily Wilson: That's when Tucker decided to work as an artist.
Artist Tucker Nichols: That really reoriented me towards what I really want and how I want to spend my time. And I'm really lucky to be married to a very idealistic woman. And when I admitted to her that what I really wanted to do was make art. All the time. Uh, she held me to it and said, okay, well, I don't understand why you'd be doing anything else then get, get on it.
Well, that was really significant too, because it came a little bit from a place of desperation. Damn, I can't keep a job. Uh, what am I going to do? How's this going to work? And then this pursuit of something that seemed so far fetched to actually build a career, [00:10:00] making things in my own language.
Host Emily Wilson: Tucker's worked with Griff Williams Gallery 16 for about 15 years.
Griff and his brother Keelan made the documentary, Tell Them We Were Here, featuring Tucker and seven other Bay Area artists. He didn't go to art school, Tucker says, and that's part of why he likes working with Griff.
Artist Tucker Nichols: I was really outside and I'm still very much outside of a certain community. I'm so friendly with a lot of those people, but they're not my, that's not my experience.
I didn't come up out of crits and having certain artists as teachers and all of that. So the people who I really gravitated were people who didn't really care about that stuff. I mean, as, as dealers. And the first one was a guy named Charles Linder, who, Was just an incredible force in my life towards enabling me to, to step into it and go for it.
And then eventually I came to get to know Griff and just loved the way that he gives permission to his [00:11:00] artists and has a lot of trust to, in faith to just say, yeah, go for it. As long as you are really good with what you're doing, I'm going to get behind it.
Host Emily Wilson: Tucker illustrated a book about the Golden Gate Bridge, This Bridge will not be Gray, written by Dave Eggers, the founder of McSweeney's publishing.
Artist Tucker Nichols: McSweeney's was on my radar right from the moment I landed in San Francisco. It was just kind of starting up. And I had read Dave's book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and had never read a book like that.
I'd never really heard someone speak in a language that I could relate to so strongly. So I was really like swept up in what McSweeney's was doing. They were having these crazy events and openings for books with like two jousters out on the sidewalk or like a thumb wrestling tournament. I mean, they're just, it was a little bit of a poke in the eye to the seriousness of the publishing world, but also forging a new path.
And that's part of what makes San Francisco [00:12:00] such a rich, place and so special is that things like McSweeney's, things like Pixar, things like, you know, these alternatives to whatever city is generally dominating a particular industry.
Host Emily Wilson: In the documentary, Tell Them We Were Here, Tucker talks about feeling like he has to do what he does. I asked him about that and he says it's what makes him feel like himself.
Artist Tucker Nichols: I've come to see that I am obsessive about making and anyone who knows me well know that, you know, at breakfast I'm just as like to be drawing on the napkin or at a dentist appointment beforehand or, you know, at a, at a meeting I'm drawing all the time.
Host Emily Wilson: I read some of the reviews of Tucker's new book, Flowers for Things I Don't Know How to Say. Many people were metaphorically leaping out of their chairs, clapping and saying it's an art book, a coffee table book, a kid's book [00:13:00] and it will make you laugh and cry. Those reviews are nice, Tucker says, but it's really when people tell him personally that the book has made a difference to them that means the most.
Artist Tucker Nichols: None of that measures even closely to the people who reach out personally and are like, Oh my God, you did something and I am feeling it and amazing. And I do get those. It's a strange book because it's not really clear what kind of book it is. Is it an art book? Is it a book of healing? Is it a humor book? Is it a book about death? It's, I don't know. It's a lot of different things.
Host Emily Wilson: Tucker appreciates how people at the Chronicle accepted the project and worked with him to shape the tone of the book.
Artist Tucker Nichols: Getting the right combination of sincerity and cynicism and humor and honestly, just sadness, unspeakable sadness is such seems like it's one of the primary experiences that we don't really know how to, [00:14:00] you Share or connect with other people about, and it just seemed like a chance to not like fill that hole and fix it, but at least point to it and say, but we do, we do experience these things.
We just don't experience them at the same time necessarily. And we can relate to each other, even when it feels like. How could we possibly,
Host Emily Wilson: This is three questions, the part of the show where I asked the artists, the same three questions. When did you know you were an artist? What's some work that made a big impression on you? And what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay area?
Artist Tucker Nichols: I first knew that I was an artist when I was making art and music on rooftops in Taiwan with this, with this group of people, I came alive in a way that I hadn't ever quite jumped into before, but I didn't [00:15:00] start calling myself an artist until I confessed to my wife that being an artist is what I actually have always wanted to do.
Then she held me to it and I immediately decided, well, I'm just going to call myself that. And that way I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to deal. I'm going to have to like, back it up. I’ve got to get busy. If I'm going to start saying I'm an artist, that's preposterous. But I, but I did it anyhow, in part, because I knew that it would force me into a space of having to figure it out.
The first thing that comes to mind in terms of a work that's made a big impact on me is Ragnar Kjellberg. Kjartansson's The Visitors, which is on view at SFMOMA and has been there for quite a while now. And it's a nine-screen video piece of a musical performance of nine or eight, I think, um, Icelandic musicians had an old [00:16:00] kind of mansion in upstate New York.
And it has made me, I've probably seen it 15 times now. It takes about an hour to watch it. I can't stop watching it. I'm on the verge of tears every time I go in there. And I think there's something that's so authentic about the way that this creativity is manifesting in this house and the magic of just making things with your friends.
And the impulse to watch how other people are experiencing the work because obviously some people are not moved by it as is true with all art, but in this room you can feel that everyone is, or a lot of people are feeling something. thing. And it's magic to be able to walk into a space at any time in the city and see people being moved by something is just, yeah, it's incredible. I love that work.
[00:17:00] The most creative inspiring place in the Bay Area for me is without questions, Headlands Center for the Arts. And, uh, Everything that they offer there from the land itself out at headlands and the crazy ocean and all the wildlife to the space to the people who are there to the people who made it. There is no environment I've ever worked in that has more creative permission, possibility, and delight than headlands.
Host Emily Wilson: Thank you for listening to Art is Awesome, and thanks to our guest, Tucker Nichols, who has a new book out Flowers for Things I don't know how to say. Please follow the show and listen next time when the guest is Hector Munoz Guzman. An artist who grew up in South Berkeley, Hector works at Oakland's Creative Growth, and he has a book, Brown [00:18:00] Eyes on Russell Street, with Sming Sming Books.
His first solo show, Tocanda Tierra, is at room 3557 in Los Angeles. Through July 5th. Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday. It's created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Goto of Goto Productions. It's carried on KSFP. P L P one Oh two point five FM, San Francisco on Fridays at 9am and 7pm.
Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod with incompetent music. Be sure and follow us on Instagram at art is awesome podcast or visit our website till next [00:19:00] time.