About

I create abstract works that follow ideas as they move between image, sound, language, and performance. My sources change from work to work and may include anything from film scores and bird calls to American slang and comedy.

I am drawn to voices with strong personalities—voices that carry the humor, history, tensions, and particular character of the cultures they emerge from. I bring them into contact with one another to explore what their encounters reveal about how we interact, and how we might imagine more creative ways of doing so.

My visual process uses the vocabulary of improvisation and forms of spontaneous composition that I absorbed and developed over fifteen years as a player in New York City’s downtown music scene. In some works, these ideas return to sound as invented scores and other tools for performance, where collaboration extends them and gives them new life.

Biography

Nicole Federici is a visual artist, improvising musician, composer, and educator. Her work brings contrasting voices, systems, and cultural references into relation through abstraction, invented notation, and forms that remain open to interpretation, collaboration, and performance.

Federici’s visual practice grows out of more than fifteen years in New York City’s jazz and experimental music communities. She worked with artists and ensembles including Shelley Hirsch, Butch Morris, Matt Wilson, William Parker, and Andrew D’Angelo, and led and co-led the chamber-jazz and experimental groups Radia and Graffito. She was also a founding member of the Douglass Street Music Collective in Brooklyn.

She performed at venues including Roulette Intermedium, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Stone, and Nublu, and appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival, Vision Festival, Undead Jazz Festival, and Winter Jazzfest as both a bandleader and collaborator. Her museum performances included projects at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Morgan Library & Museum.

Federici’s work with Butch Morris brought her into contact with musicians from widely differing international and avant-garde traditions. Navigating differences in musical values, philosophies, and vocabularies taught her to use friction as a source of unexpected affinity and new process. These experiences reshaped her practice around improvisation, collective invention, individual voice, and the possibilities created when contrasting forms of expression encounter one another.

Performing in museums alongside visual artists reawakened Federici’s early involvement with visual art. Her participation in Christian Marclay’s integrated music and visual compositions during his Whitney Museum retrospective further opened a path from sound back into image and helped establish the foundation of her current work.

Federici also founded and directed Sonic Smithy, an ensemble devoted to spontaneous composition and performance across musical genres. The program brought young musicians into collaboration with established New York artists including Butch Morris, Andrew D’Angelo, Cornelius Dufallo, Kenny Wollesen, Marco Cappelli, Slavic Soul Party, and Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Sonic Smithy performed at the Vision Festival and Joe’s Pub and presented a monthly performance series at Roulette. Federici later served as music director and conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Youth Orchestra.

She studied classical music, visual art, and writing at Interlochen Arts Academy, earned a Bachelor of Music from the Eastman School of Music and a Master of Arts in music performance and literature from Queens College, CUNY, and pursued doctoral studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.