Artist Anne Faith Nicholls often employs the universal language of symbolism to relate to viewers on a subconscious level.
PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY ARDENPROJECTS.COM
Artist Anne Faith Nicholls has traveled the world studying masters like Salvador Dalí and Frida Kahlo. Much of her own work speaks to the female experience. Although she doesn’t consider herself “overtly political,” her work begs to differ.
Nicholls, who lives in Palm Springs, finds meaning in the #MeToo movement and draws deeply from her experiences as the daughter of a single mother who came up in the ’60s and ’70s and is now watching the rights she fought for being threatened once again.
Nicholls poses with her artwork.
Nicholls drew inspiration from a 2010 Guerrilla Girls exhibition in Paris and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where the exhibition “An Incomplete History of Protest” featured a historical survey of protest ephemera. “The combined impact of those presentations, and what was happening around me, emboldened me to take a more confrontational approach to my subject matter and expand beyond the limits of the canvas to signage, flags, and more utilitarian mediums, which proved to be both cathartic and resonate,” she says.
In 2023, Nicholls created The Flags of Our Mothers series partly to reflect the fringed banners used by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Masonic symbolism. She “aims to reclaim and reassign the classically male trope of fraternity art to the sisterhood of feminism.”
Nicholls' artwork.
The “Women Are Watching” flag, one of four hand-painted designs, takes a stab at the male gaze and its characteristic objectification. “While classical depictions of the female image in art have traditionally lacked confrontation, this is a direct reversal of the male gaze,” Nicholls says. “It doesn’t state any one opinion or political stance, but it’s a sentient reminder that intends to jog the moral compass of society.”