About

Miguel Nelson (b. 1967, Tucson, Arizona) is a Los Angeles-based artist working across painting, sculpture, performance, film, architecture, and collaborative forms. His practice explores the relationships between images, objects, people, and constructed environments, often finding unexpected connections between ordinary materials and seemingly unrelated situations.

Since 2016, Nelson has developed two distinct bodies of paintings. His Rock Paintings originate in photographs of geological formations taken during travels throughout the American Southwest, Mexico, and the Mediterranean. His more recent Film Paintings are developed from photographs taken directly from a television screen while watching films. Working in acrylic on unprimed hemp, Nelson transforms these incidental images through color, gesture, and the physical behavior of paint, allowing recognizable figures and objects to move between representation and abstraction.

Nelson's earlier work centered on large-scale installations, performances, and collaborative projects. His work has been presented at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, High Desert Test Sites, and through commissions from the Fellows of Contemporary Art. In 2020, he completed two eighteen-foot paintings for the Railway Exchange Building in Chicago.

Beginning in 2004, Nelson also developed a series of architectural and social environments in Los Angeles, including Marvimon, SmogShoppe, Millwick, and Flora Chang. These projects brought together architecture, landscape, sculpture, performance, and collaboration over extended periods. In 2025, he initiated Rudy Caballero, a collective artistic fiction first presented at LOOT Gallery in Mexico City during Zona Maco.

Nelson received his MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in 2002.