Miguel Nelson
Miguel Nelson (b. 1967, Tucson, Arizona) is a Los Angeles-based artist working across painting, sculpture, performance, film, architecture, and collaborative forms. His recent Film Paintings (2025–present) draw from cinema, although their relationship to the original films is seldom straightforward. Painted in acrylic on unprimed hemp, they retain a curious familiarity while remaining difficult to place. They seem to belong to stories that have continued somewhere beyond the picture.
This interest in the uncertain relationships between images, objects, and people has a longer and less conventional history. Beginning in the early 2000s, Nelson developed elaborate installations, performances, cabarets, and films in which sculpture, food, music, choreography, cameras, and invited guests became interdependent elements of the work. Projects such as Margaritaville, Margarita Oasis, Desert Mirage, and Foodyteria placed familiar social rituals in improbable circumstances. These were carefully orchestrated situations whose outcomes were never entirely predictable. At times, the distinction between an artwork and the circumstances surrounding it became difficult to maintain.
Beginning with Marvimon in 2004, Nelson extended these experiments into inhabitable architectural environments. SmogShoppe, Millwick, Flora Chang, and other projects combined salvaged architecture, sculpture, landscape, and social activity in spaces that continued to evolve long after their initial construction. His latest project, 42! (2026–present), brings painting, life, and artistic collaboration together within a Downtown Los Angeles studio-playroom-residence.
Nelson collaborated with Jason Rhoades on the Black Pussy Soirée Macramé Cabarets and with Andrea Zittel through High Desert Test Sites. His work has been presented at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and High Desert Test Sites, with additional commissions from the Fellows of Contemporary Art. His separate Rock Paintings (2016–present) originate in photographs of geological formations. In 2025, he initiated Rudy Caballero, an ongoing collective fiction in which an imaginary artist provides a shared identity for works made by real collaborators.
Nelson received his MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in 2002.