About:
Nicole Cheng (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her family has migrated far distances from their ancestral lands, with five generations dispersed across six continents. With every move, her ancestors had to redefine their connection to Chinese heritage and remake a sense of home. Nicole continued this tradition growing up as an immigrant in Hong Kong and now in Lenapehoking, constantly exploring what it means to make in and of place. Her current focus is on building imagination infrastructure that will help us land in a future where every one of us – from Palestine to Sudan to the Congo and to New York – will be free.
Nicole’s work has been shown at pilot + projects; Philadelphia, Hong Kong Art Book Fair; Hong Kong, Singapore Art Book Fair; Singapore, LIC Arts Open at The Factory; New York, Franconia in the City @ Casket; Minneapolis and others. She was awarded a National Youth Award in Singapore for her work with cultural heritage conservation in 2020 and was a 2025 Forefront Fellow at the Urban Design Forum.
Works:
A Love Letter to New York
Elders collage at a creative aging workshop A Love Letter To New York, at the Edie Windsor SAGE Center. This workshop was part of a larger project called Lifelong City, which envisioned what aging in NYC could look like in the next 35 years, as part of the Urban Design Forum’s Forefront Fellowship. Photo by Joan Encarnacion.
Free Palestine
Free Palestine quilt created while hosting a queer quilting circle in Brooklyn.
Diasporic Gardens
Diasporic Gardens was a participatory art project that engaged folks of various diasporas through collage. This series of frame loom weavings were inspired by collages and interviews I held with participants of collage workshops.
Workshops:
Participate in quilting a queer archive of Brooklyn through submitting a block or joining upcoming workshops in the Fall at the Brooklyn Community Pride Center. BIPOC registration prioritized. Visit lesbianworkshop.com or email lesbianworkshop@gmail.com for more details.
“Quilting An Archive of Queer Brooklyn” is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.
What Nicole’s Looking Forward to:
I am already enjoying, and to look forward to continuing to enjoy, the luxury of having a studio space with AC!! I am energized and excited about the creative experiments I plan on doing as part of this larger project Quilting An Archive of Queer Brooklyn, as well as discovering a rhythm of artistic practice that will sustain me while in residence and beyond.
