Nico Cathcart: Art with Purpose

by Charles McGuigan 04.2021

Nico Cathcart sits at a table on her back deck in the Northside just a stone’s throw from the city line, but it feels as if it’s way out in the country many miles removed from the urban discord. The yard is ringed in tall trees that have just started budding out, and everywhere there is the trill and warble and chirrup and cheep of a hundred birds seen and unseen in among a forest that seems intent on gobbling up this home and its plot of land. When I ask her why there are so many birds in her paintings and murals, Nico cocks her head slightly. “I use a lot of birds because of my hearing,” she says. “That’s how I realized I was going deaf; I couldn’t hear the birds anymore.”

We watch a pair of house finches alight on the rail, and then suddenly take to flight. “I have a genetic condition that basically causes my cochlea to go bald, and what you hear is actually your brain interpreting little vibrations from these hairs in the cochlea and mine are just kind of falling out,” she tells me. “It’s probably been happening my whole life, but about ten years it started to be a huge problem, and it’s going downhill a little bit more each year. My hearing will eventually lead to the point where I’m either going to need to just communicate through sign language, or get a cochlea implant.”

Though Nico has only about 30 percent of her hearing left, she uses assistive technology and is a proficient lip reader—not a skill she studied, but something her remarkable brain figured out on its own.

“The vast majority of my work comes through studio works and murals,” Nico tells me. “But I am also an advocate for women in the arts, and I’m an advocate for deaf people in the arts, so my work includes an element of activism in pretty much everything I do.”

And from the time her first memories were formed, Nico loved expressing herself through visual art.

“I’ve been an artist my whole life, I knew what I wanted to do, I never had a questioning period,” she says. “I’ve been painting since I was five, so even back then I was going to school for art. I did not know that I would end up doing what I do now at that time because I didn’t realize that being a muralist was even a thing that happened anymore.” 

When Nico was very young, her mother, Cindy, who worked as a graphic artist, gave her daughter a drafting table of her own and would bring her rolls of recycled brown packing paper. “And I would paint with watercolors and gouache,” she remembers. “I would copy other painters; that’s how you learn. I loved van Gogh. It’s bright, it’s colorful. I used to paint and try to replicate those brush strokes with gouache, which you can’t do. I’ve been obsessed with the great artists since I was a kid.” 

By the time she became a teenager, Nico began working in oils, and she was fortunate enough to have a few instructors who could see her promise. 

“I think every artist deserves to have a really great teacher when they’re young because that makes all the difference in the world,” says Nico. “I had two high school art teachers and a junior high teacher who were all amazing and they kind of saw something in me.” 

One of them, who could see her unique talent and excessive drive, would give her something that became almost a guidepost on her path to becoming artist and muralist. “He saw something and he pushed me and he gave me a book of the Sistine Chapel,” Nico says. “I was probably fifteen and that book is sitting inside on my table right now. And I started learning about drawing figures by copying the Sistine Chapel ceiling.”

Born in Toronto, Canada’s most populous cities and one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world,  Nico, in her teens at the time, moved with her family to a tiny town in central New York called Homer—a Schitt’s Creek sort of place. After graduating from high school in Homer, Nico went off to college to study art. 

“I started at SUNY Oswego which is on Lake Ontario in northern New York,” she says. “I had an amazing set of young professors. I went there for four years, took a year off, and then went back to SUNY Courtland and did another four years. So I ended up with a double BFA in painting and ceramics, and a minor in art history.”

Even in college, Nico would show her work wherever she could. Which generally meant a bar or a restaurant. A high school friend of hers from New York had settled in Richmond, and he invited her down for a visit. “He was in a punk band here in the 2000s when Richmond was a super punk town,” Nico says. “He had a punk house in Scott’s Addition. It was a dirty nasty place. This dude lived in the closet, but he got me a show at Mojo’s. I just came down with my super tacky naked ladies paintings and hung them on the wall.”

But she stayed for a week, and her love affair with Richmond blossomed during those seven short days. “We went down to the river, we went to punk shows,” she recalls. “We were biking around the city, going to Hollywood. And I was like, ‘This is the jam, this is the place.’ It’s when Scott’s Addition was still Scott’s Addition. No tall buildings. There was still a porn shop there. I used to walk from Scott’s Addition to the Devil’s Triangle to get a beer at Café Diem or Banditos and everybody make jokes about the bullet holes in the bar.”

And the rear façade of Bandito’s would become home to Nico’s first solo mural, one that features a skull. “It’s now on the Valentine’s historic registry and they interviewed me about it,” she says. 

Nico readily adapted to Richmond. She joined the River City Rollergirls. “I was not a great blocker,” she says. “But I could go really fast. I grew up in Canada where they put skates on you the moment you can walk, so I’ve been skating my whole life.” One of her teammates named Alex was working with Art 180 at the time, which led to Nico getting a panel for the Street Art Festival, which then led to her being given an entire wall. “So I started painting murals because I’ve always been an ambitious person,” she says. “Everything is a hill to climb.”

The GRTC Street Art Festival opened up the world of murals for Nico. “I fell in love with painting murals immediately,” she says. “At that Street Art Fest I met so many amazing artists from all over the place. Like I had no business to be painting next to some of these people. They were already masters.”

It was there too that she met the man who would take her as a sort of apprentice under his enormous outstretched wings. “That’s where I met the godfather of all muralists around here—Ed Trask,” she says. “Turns out our kids were in the same class together at school and we hit it off and he asked me to help him out with projects. I started helping him by filling in the backgrounds. I worked with him for a couple years. It was like being an assistant.” 

Nico also worked with El Camino, who had a background in sign painting. “I learned about using long sign painting and pin striping brushes from him,” she says. “I was getting my chops.”

About three years ago, Nico struck out on her own. “I was completely separate,” she says. “And I have done a lot since then.”

When I ask if she has a favorite, Nico is reluctant. “They’re all like my children, they’re still my babies,” she says, then after a brief pause adds. “Cosmic Moxie is one of my enduring favorites though. It’s on Vitality Float Spa on Robinson, the floating lady. That was one of the first ones that made me.”

Every great work of music, of literature, of art is immune to the predilections of time and space. Whether they were crafted in the time of the pharaohs or at the height of the Renaissance, whether they were made in Italy or in Istanbul, they transcend it all in a language that speaks to our universal eyes and ears and hearts and souls. This certainly holds true of the mural and gallery works of Nico Cathacart.

One her frequent themes revolves around Mother Earth. “I do a lot of work with climate change and the environment,” says Nico. “All my skull series are murals that are meant to talk about how we’re tied into nature. Everything that I do is trying to be intentional about talking about something that we really need to focus on. I think AOC is on to something with the Green New Deal. We need to talk about solar. We need to talk about implementing larger recycling programs because right now they estimate nine percent of what you recycle actually gets recycled.”

Weeks before COVID-19 struck, Nico went to Maui and visited a marine sanctuary in the clear waters of Honolua Bay. She snorkeled and went on a snuba dive tour among the coral reefs. “It was an incredible experience,” she says. “We swam a half-mile out to this beautiful reef, along the walls of these coral canyons.” As far as the eye could see, there was nothing, not even a single house dotting the distant shore. “And in that pristine water below the surface there was plastic on the coral.”

 Shortly after she returned, Nico was given a prestigious honor. “I got inducted into the Virginia Museum of History and Culture,” she says. “They did a project called agents of change and they recognized thirty woman who invoked real change in the state. So it was a big thing for me. I was the only visual artist. I was very humbled by it. We did this picture recreating a famous suffragette photo. The whole thing was because of the hundred year anniversary of white women getting the right to vote. You’ve got to say that because it was an uphill battle for a lot of people who weren’t white.”

 “These changes are never overnight,” I suggest. “They are gradual. But you have to do what the civil rights leaders always said, ‘Keep your eyes on the prize.’ And what women suffragettes did. You keep moving forward.

Nico nods. “What you said there is exactly why I do what I do,” she says. “Because all you can do is push forward. This whole conversation about climate change and those who deny it. I have to be out here painting things that bring attention to what is happening to our environment.”

She shows me a series of large blue panels stacked against her house. They were was part of an exhibit held at Hermitage Museum and Gardens in Norfolk. Called “Unknown Outcomes”, it included the works of a number of artists, and focused on the evils human beings have unleashed on the Mother of Life, our oceans. Nico’s contribution, “Symbiotic Swim”, consisted of five massive eight-foot panels hinged together and expanded accordion-style.  

On one side is a pristine undersea view of a variety of jellyfish rising elegantly; the reverse side features the same ultramarine ocean background, but in place of the sea jellies are the inelegant constructs of human beings—clear plastic bags, the sort that that you might get at one of the chain grocery stores or convenience stores or corporate pharmacies. One of them even displays a yellow smiley face with the message, ‘THANK YOU HAVE A NICE DAY! 

One of the largest murals she ever painted is in Rochester, New York. Her mural covers one entire wall of Planned Parenthood building. “It’s sixty feet tall with no windows and it’s all about the control that women have over their bodies,” she explains. 

The central image is a massive head of an antlered Artermis. “Within the antlers is the lifecycle of a bluebird which is New York’s state bird is a bluebird,” Nico says. “And then there’s a nest on one side and there are bird skulls on the bottom. It’s the full lifecycle. And across the whole building is the full cycle of the moon.” 

We talk about the uprising that occurred last summer across America after the brutal murder of George Floyd. She mentions the Confederate monuments that were taken down right here in Richmond, and the only one remaining on Monument Avenue, the one of Lee, the base of which has been transformed into a piece of art . “I honestly don’t want them to move that,” she says. “I just want them to take the damned fence down.” She considers the removal of the other monuments. “It was like watching the liberation of a people,” Nico says.  

In the not-too-distant future, one of her murals will grace the north façade of True North Yoga on MacArthur Avenue in Bellevue. According to the owner of the yoga studio, the mural will reflect the diversity and inclusivity that define the Northside community. Although the entire mural hasn’t been sketched out completely, it will include several elements. “There will be two women from the community,” says Nico. “There will be a rainbow shape that’s all in different blues and there will be peace lilies coming out of the side. And there will a hidden bird.” 

Many of her murals contain references to issues of social justice and the like. “My objective is to talk about issues that matter,” Nico says. “So I like to talk about the importance of community and I like to talk about women’s empowerment. And I like to talk about minority empowerment.”

She mentions a collaborative piece she did with an image of Vice President Kamala Harris.  “A glass ceiling has been broken,” says Nico. “She’s broken that barrier. The next generation of young women will not have to think that that barrier ever existed, and I want to make work that makes women feel that way.”

Nico gives me her take on the nature of art.

“Public art, and art in general, has always been a way to talk about complex issues in a way that transcends the complexity of it and reaches out towards the human condition,” she says. “With a painting you can talk about something big and complex like plastic in the ocean or the rise in temperature of the ocean or a disabled person being unable to complete a task. You can make a picture about that and people will understand the complexities of it, and it’s something you can do without words. Public art is the oldest art form. The first public art was scribbled on the walls of caves.”

We talk into the late afternoon, and as the day warms up the birds become almost raucous, particularly three large crows arguing over the topmost branch of an oak tree.

 “I will go back and bring it full circle, and talk about Michelangelo again—the theme in my damned life,” Nico says. She invites me to consider the Creation of Adam fresco painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the one that shows God’s outstretched finger moving toward Adam’s hand. Then, she reminds me of the curved pink space where God is stationed and surrounded by his heavenly host. 

“He is literally in a human brain,” she tells me. “It’s a cross section of the cerebral cortex.  It is so obvious what Michelangelo is saying in the middle of one of the holiest places in the world—man created god in his head. It is so subversive, and I love that as a public art piece.”

And then she talks about a woman and her son, a three-dimensional piece by the same man who painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. This one, of creamy white marble, depicts the Stabat Mater. “The Pieta is probably the most perfect sculpture that ever existed,” say artist Nico Cathcart. “I’m not a religious person, but there is a transcendent feeling that happens there. It’s so graceful, and it’s insane to think that it’s marble. Michelangelo just had to find the shape in the stone.”