Expanded chronology

2002 MFA, California College of Arts and Crafts, now California College of the Arts, San Francisco

1990 MBA, Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley.

1992-1999 Early Practice

San Francisco Bay Area Nelson began working creatively in earnest in 1992 and left a real-estate development position in 1993 to pursue art. The following years were spent experimenting with painting and digital media while repeatedly applying to graduate art programs. The period established a pattern that would persist: rapid movement between media, a willingness to build new structures around the work, and a tendency to understand artistic practice as something larger than the production of discrete objects.

2000-2002 California College of Arts and Crafts

MFA Studio Practice, San Francisco Graduate work expanded into sculpture, installation, performance, painting and architectural propositions. Nelson built dense, often costly immersive situations in which objects and spaces operated in relation to one another rather than as isolated works. Ralph Rugoff served as a critic during this period; the program also brought Nelson into sustained contact with figures including Larry Rinder, Matthew Higgs, Jeremy Deller and a rotating group of visiting artists, curators and dealers. His thesis proposed five large-scale projects for the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Tate Turbine Hall, Hamburger Bahnhof and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The projects remained proposals, presented through large-format renderings in custom walnut frames designed to travel as sculptural conversation pieces.

2001-2003 International Art-World Research and Outreach

New York, London, Paris, Zurich, Berlin, Venice, Kassel, Basel, Miami and beyond Alongside graduate work and immediately afterward, Nelson traveled intensively through the international contemporary-art circuit, visiting galleries, museums, biennials and art fairs while pursuing studio visits and meetings with dealers, curators and artists. The travel functioned both as career pursuit and as field research into the systems, spaces and rituals through which contemporary art circulates.

2002-2003 New York / London Artist Books

Nelson photographed the facades and interiors of leading galleries in New York and London, then returned to San Francisco and invited friends and family to translate selected gallery images into drawings and watercolors. The photographs and handmade interpretations were paired in custom archival albums, one devoted to New York and one to London. The books were conceived as sculpture as much as documentation: objects that folded travel, ambition, family participation and the architecture of the art market into something intimate and portable. Blum & Poe considered taking the books to Frieze in 2003 and retained them for a period, although they were not ultimately shown there. Collaborators / contributors: Friends and family contributed drawings and watercolors; project discussed with Blum & Poe.

2003 onward Hollywood / Chateau Alto Nido

Hollywood, Los Angeles After graduate school, Nelson moved to Hollywood and treated the move itself as a transformation project. At the Chateau Alto Nido, the apartment became an evolving environment combining painting, sculpture, found furnishings, mirrors, a custom aquamarine shag form and the lights and mythology of Hollywood outside the windows. The project blurred domestic life, self-invention and artistic staging. Hollywood was not simply a location but a feedback system: a place where ambition, theatricality and the awareness of their absurdity could coexist.

2003 Unofficial Getty Monthly Planner

A limited-edition calendar combining Nelson's paintings of the Getty Museum with animals associated with the Los Angeles Zoo, personal dates and the increasingly dense international calendar of fairs, biennials and exhibitions. Approximately 200 copies were distributed directly to art dealers during Art Basel Miami. The project functioned simultaneously as organizer, sculpture, promotional object and a dry observation about an art world becoming increasingly global, scheduled and bureaucratic.

2004-2014 Marvimon

Los Angeles Nelson acquired and transformed a long-abandoned automobile showroom near Chinatown into a hybrid domestic, social and performative environment. Roughly one third of the roof was removed to create an internal courtyard; existing industrial fabric was retained and recombined with glass, salvaged materials, furniture, landscape and custom architectural interventions. Originally conceived as a real-estate project that might finance an art career, Marvimon instead became both an inhabitable sculpture and the generative setting for a sustained sequence of dinners, performances, films, installations and collaborations. The original building was sold in 2015, after a decade in which the distinction between artwork, home, venue and production apparatus steadily dissolved.

2005-2006 Secret Restaurant

Marvimon, Los Angeles A sequence of five invitation-only dinner environments developed with Randy Clement of Silver Lake Wine. Each edition brought food, wine, music, projection, performance and social choreography into the architecture of Marvimon. The premise was intimate and apparently straightforward, but the dinners increasingly behaved like temporary installations in which hospitality itself became the structure. Chefs included Nancy Silverton, Suzanne Tracht and many others. One later edition combined a concert grand Steinway performance, projected art, paired food and drink, and a Zamboni. The series was covered by The New York Times and other lifestyle and cultural press. Collaborators / contributors: Randy Clement; participating chefs including Nancy Silverton and Suzanne Tracht; rotating musicians, artists and performers.

2005 Arctic Landscape

Marvimon, Los Angeles One of the first fully realized art events at Marvimon. Umar Rashid, also known as Frohawk Two Feathers, painted two monumental window murals depicting an impossible polar war between Antarctica and the Arctic. Inside, artificial snow, blocks of ice, blue theatrical light, sculpture, performance and distorted projection turned the warehouse into a nocturnal climate fiction. The project established a collaborative working method that would recur throughout Nelson's practice: a central proposition expanded by other artists until authorship became porous and the space itself became the medium. Collaborators / contributors: Umar Rashid / Frohawk Two Feathers; Chris Natrop; Dancer X; additional performers and musicians.

2006 Margaritaville

Group exhibition curated by Allison Spellacy, MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Los Angeles Invited to make a work about driving in Los Angeles, Nelson developed a film and performance with Jonathan Krisel using a 1984 gold Mercedes convertible as both vehicle and mobile stage. They crossed Los Angeles making and serving margaritas wherever the car stopped, turning the trunk into a temporary bar and the city into a loose sequence of encounters. Krisel filmed and edited the material into a music-driven work that later reappeared inside ZaratExperience. The project established the automobile, hospitality and intoxication as recurring devices for altering the viewer's relation to a place. Collaborators / contributors: Jonathan Krisel, film and editing; curated by Allison Spellacy.

2006 The Rapture of Yukio Murasaki

Marvimon, Los Angeles A one-night collaborative performance and installation developed with Wanda Chan around her invented persona Yukio Murasaki. Chan underwent a sequence of transformations on the forty-foot Secret Restaurant table while the audience occupied a position somewhere between witness, participant and social scenery. The event included costume, mural painting, tequila ritual, music, an edible sculpture and extensive HD documentation. The documentation was treated as integral to the work rather than a secondary record. Collaborators / contributors: Wanda Chan; Carolyn Mason; Billy Mallery; Josh White; additional musicians and performers.

2006 Margarita Oasis, Desert Mirage

High Desert Test Sites, Wonder Valley / Joshua Tree, California Invited by Andrea Zittel to participate in High Desert Test Sites, Nelson drove the same gold Mercedes used in Margaritaville into the desert and staged it as if it had crash-landed near a salt mine. The trunk held supplies for roughly 300 handmade margaritas, served at sunset to artists, locals and visitors who found their way to the site. The work condensed several recurring concerns into a deceptively simple social sculpture: landscape as stage, hospitality as performance, an ordinary vehicle made theatrical, and intoxication used as a literal alteration of perception. Collaborators / contributors: Invited by Andrea Zittel; assistance from Sherry Walsh; salt connection through Jason Rhoades.

2006 Hot Lady Heaven

Marvimon, Los Angeles An immersive event combining performance, installation, film, fashion, food, music and a deliberately unstable relationship between spectacle and audience. At the center of the space, Wonder Valley salt and a suspended meteorite placed geological and cosmic material in tension with an evening of bodies, garments, music, projected Hollywood fragments and ritualized excess. The audience did not occupy a fixed viewing position. Guests moved through a sequence of staged situations and became part of the visual field being filmed, photographed and performed. Collaborators / contributors: Georges-Pascal Riccordeau, sculptural and fashion interventions; John Lieske, music; Jon & Vinny, food; Josh White, meteorite and photography; additional performers and film crew.

2006 ZaratExperience

Marvimon, Los Angeles A large-scale performance, installation and film built around the music and persona of Nelson's cousin Eddie. The event unfolded through successive identities, beginning with a quasi-prehistoric rite, moving through disco and video feedback, and ending with an autobiographical performance in which the theatrical persona gradually collapsed back into Eddie himself. Costume, choreography, family photographs, custom graphics, staged arrival by public bus, HD cameras and pre-existing works were folded together into a temporary mythology that was simultaneously ridiculous, affectionate and carefully constructed. Collaborators / contributors: Eddie; Bobby; a large volunteer cast of dancers, stylists, performers and film crew.

2006 Babies All Grown Up

Marvimon, Los Angeles An immersive art performance and sculptural environment disguised as Veronica Fernandez's thirtieth birthday celebration. Fernandez curated multiple artists into the event, allowing music, sculpture, food, floral work, surveillance, performance and social behavior to overlap without resolving into a single focal work. The evening was later edited into a short film, extending the event into a second, mediated form. Collaborators / contributors: Curated by Veronica Fernandez; Carolyn Mason; Chuck Moffitt; Holly Vesecky; Jon & Vinny; the Hillbilly Knights; additional artists and performers.

2007 Foodyteria

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles Invited to produce LACE's annual benefit, Nelson developed a participatory installation organized around food, queuing, photography, video and the choreography of gallery space. A single continuous taped line moved through the exhibition like a mark on a film set, guiding visitors toward a cafeteria-style sequence of small dishes and drinks. Cafeteria trays became palettes for edible compositions and then props for participant portraits. Outside, parked automobiles and discarded cardboard cartons formed a temporary perimeter, extending the installation into the parking lot. Collaborators / contributors: Jonathan Krisel, video collaboration; Cameron Gainer, participant portraits; rotating chefs and contributors.

2007 Suspended Animation

Commissioned by Fellows of Contemporary Art, Marvimon, Los Angeles Commissioned after Fellows of Contemporary Art encountered Foodyteria at LACE. Nelson curated a quieter, more suspended environment of sculptural interventions, food, floral work, performance and a film made specifically for the evening. For the film Suspended Animation, Nelson entered the homes of FOCA collectors and ignored the artworks, filming instead brief details such as light on carpet, chair legs and reflections. The resulting loop transformed private domestic fragments into an anonymous architecture of attention. Collaborators / contributors: Tony Brown; Carolyn Mason; Eben Goff; Holly Vesecky; participating FOCA collectors.

2007 USC vs. UCLA

Marvimon, Los Angeles A tongue-in-cheek competition proposed between the graduate art programs at USC and UCLA, with a bronze award called the Castelli intended for the winning school. When both institutions resisted participation, the refusals, email chains and etiquette surrounding the invitation became the exhibition itself. The finished Castelli plaque was ultimately delivered to Russell Ferguson at UCLA. What began as a proposed collaboration became a work about institutional self-consciousness, competitive structures and the revealing content of non-participation. Collaborators / contributors: Holly Vesecky, floral base for the Castelli; Eben Goff; correspondence with USC and UCLA participants.

2008-present SmogShoppe

Los Angeles An immersive architectural environment developed from a former auto repair and smog-check facility. From the beginning, Nelson conceived the project as an inhabitable sculpture that could also host events. Existing industrial material was retained and recombined with tall concrete courtyard walls, living plant systems, solar power, salvaged architecture, theatrical signage and small references to Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre. The project marks a shift from placing temporary art events inside architecture to making the architecture itself carry the experiential charge. Early neon elements also initiated a long-term collaboration with Raul Romero. Collaborators / contributors: Sherry Walsh; Raul Romero; Tony Brown and other makers and fabricators across the project.

June 27, 2008 Banana Daiquiri Seance

Presented as part of Party Favors, curated by Holly Myers, Bonelli Contemporary, Chinatown, Los Angeles A one-night performance and installation built as a candlelit, tropical seance around an intentionally absurd origin myth: that human consciousness might have emerged through the combined effects of psychedelia, a banana peel and a mild concussion. Guests received banana daiquiris only after participating in the ritual of slipping on a banana peel. Live music, wearable floral interventions, low light, improvised group action and HD filming turned the gallery into a temporary social fiction. The event belongs to the same lineage as Foodyteria and the Marvimon works, but in a smaller and more concentrated form. Collaborators / contributors: Umar Rashid / Frohawk Two Feathers; Chad Brown; Jed Meldhow; Holly Vesecky; Jonathan Krisel, film; curated by Holly Myers.

2009 Shiner

SmogShoppe, Los Angeles A fully choreographed performance, installation and film that used SmogShoppe itself as stage architecture. A silver 1963 Lincoln Continental was forced sideways into the narrow interior and became an entrance machine: guests emerged from the automobile in pairs and danced down an LED-lit runway while being filmed in reverse tracking movement. Ryan Heffington choreographed the opening sequence as a stylized car crash that abruptly transformed into tightly controlled dance. Jonathan Krisel filmed and edited the event; Zach Cowie and Petey Kleinman contributed to the music. The result gathered architecture, performance, fashion, food, music and film into one of Nelson's most formally composed social works. Collaborators / contributors: Ryan Heffington, choreography; Jonathan Krisel, film and editing; Zach Cowie and Petey Kleinman, music; Rya Kleinpeter; Danielle Motor; Chad Brown; additional dancers and contributors.

2009-2015 Woolly Pocket

Woolly Pocket began as a vertical-garden system developed for Marvimon and later SmogShoppe. Recycled felt planters transformed blank walls into living surfaces, and repeated requests for the system pushed the project from site-specific design into a nationally distributed product and visual identity. Nelson directed branding and marketing, working with photographer Josh White on a surreal, soft-psychedelic campaign influenced by Hipgnosis. The project appeared in Dwell and on Martha Stewart, reached retailers including Design Within Reach, CB2, Home Depot, Walmart and Target, and expanded into Woolly School Gardens, which placed growing systems in more than 300 schools. The project is best understood within the larger practice as art passing through the form of a product: an attempt to make living matter interrupt flat architecture at scale. Collaborators / contributors: Sherry Walsh, early development; Rodney Nelson, manufacturing and shipping; Josh White, photography; Doug Hammer, tagline and copy collaboration; additional designers and fabricators.

2014-present Millwick

Downtown Los Angeles Arts District Adaptive reuse of a former livery and later alfalfa-sprout facility into an architectural and sculptural environment. Large skylights, cuts through the concrete floor, mature interior plants, reclaimed brick and existing industrial remnants were arranged to make the building unfold gradually rather than reveal itself all at once. The project became an important site of collaboration with Tony Brown, whose handmade ceramic architectural elements and large cut-paper collage became embedded in the space. Chuck Moffitt and Nelson developed a bar from a fallen eucalyptus tree from the Los Angeles Zoo, allowing subsequent visitors to carve their own names into the surface. Collaborators / contributors: Tony Brown; Chuck Moffitt; Sherry Walsh; additional builders and fabricators.

2015 Monument Valley

Navajo Nation, Arizona / Utah; later projected in an empty warehouse in Downtown Los Angeles A photographic research trip with Zach Cowie undertaken as preparation for a painting series Nelson had imagined for years. Sunrise, midday and sunset studies of the formations treated the landscape less as scenery than as a set of presences whose identities changed with light and distance. The photographs were subsequently presented as projections in a group exhibition with Tony Brown in an empty Downtown Los Angeles warehouse. The trip became the point of departure for the Rock Paintings and for a monumental 96 × 216 in (244 × 549 cm) Monument Valley painting later made in situ at Flora Chang. Collaborators / contributors: Zach Cowie, travel and research companion; Tony Brown, group exhibition collaborator.

2016 Jolly Night at the Races

Downtown Los Angeles A one-night gesamtkunstwerk staged inside a 16,000-square-foot former marijuana production facility before its redevelopment. A circular indoor racetrack became the organizing structure for participatory horse racing in which guests carried miniature sculptural horses on silver tablespoons while drinking mint juleps. The event accumulated sculpture, painting, music, food, chance operations, found racing ephemera, a funereal horse-hoof procession, floral ceremony and live filming. Nelson also presented one of his first substantial paintings after a long interval, a thickly built image of the sun on raw linen that partially sloughed off during the evening. The original invitation described the project as an ensemble work, and that description is accurate: its form emerged through the interdependence of many individual contributions rather than through a single dominant object. Collaborators / contributors: Tony Brown; Joshua Beckman; Gioj De Marco; Chuck Moffitt; Chris Natrop; Edwina Nelson; Umar Rashid / Frohawk Two Feathers; Holly Vesecky; Chad Brown; Jose Alvarado; Jed Mayhew; Danielle Motor; additional guests and performers.

2016-present Flora Chang

Downtown Los Angeles A site-specific interior, listening environment and evolving archive assembled largely from salvaged architectural material and inherited histories. Elements from the demolished Anawalt House, including doors, carpet, lamps, books, switches and postcards, were recombined with wood salvaged from adjacent buildings and new objects made collaboratively for the space. A hybrid light sculpture combines Jose Alvarado's oak construction, Tony Brown's ceramics and Raul Romero's neon. A listening room developed with Zach Cowie uses Klipschorn speakers, tube amplification and vinyl playback as an architectural component rather than as separate equipment. The room also houses Nelson's Monument Valley painting and artifacts from earlier collaborative works. Flora Chang operates less like a finished interior than a living archive in which materials, artworks, sound and memories from other projects continue to accumulate. Collaborators / contributors: Tony Brown; Jose Alvarado; Raul Romero; Zach Cowie; Amal Flores; additional contributors and donors.

2016-present Rock Paintings

An ongoing painting series developed from Nelson's photographs of geological formations in Monument Valley, Picacho Peak, the Aeolian Islands, Careyes and other locations. Early experiments with heavy acrylic gave way to poured, soaked and physically manipulated acrylic on raw or backed linen, allowing surface tension and absorption to become active compositional forces. The rocks are not treated simply as landscape subjects. They operate as characters, thresholds and seemingly animate presences, objects that remain mute while suggesting an interior life. The series marked a return to sustained painting after years dominated by collaborative and architectural work.

2017-present The North Sea

Downtown Los Angeles A neighborhood-scale public-realm project focused on the historic Downtown Los Angeles seafood district. Nelson and collaborators treated the district as an environmental composition, landscaping thousands of linear feet of sidewalk and developing a continuous seafood mural across roughly a dozen commercial facades over six city blocks. The project extended the environmental thinking of Valentine / Grass Room beyond the property line, using planting, painting, neighborhood identity and existing commercial history as material. Collaborators / contributors: Stacey Lynn Smith and company, mural painting; neighborhood businesses, fabricators and landscape collaborators.

2017-present Valentine / Grass Room

Downtown Los Angeles Nelson's most ambitious architectural and sculptural environment to that point, developed from three buildings with distinct histories: a turn-of-the-century brothel, the former Central Fish and Oyster Company, and a mid-century cold-storage structure later used for marijuana production. Selective demolition and salvage were combined with new greenhouse roofs, custom wall treatments, carved beams, murals, plant life, ceramic relief and invented layers of history. Tony Brown and Nelson developed TONYCOTTA, a clay and joint-compound wall surface capable of cracking, holding pigment and accepting inscription. Josh Beckman, Stacey Lynn Smith, Ivan Lee Mora and Umar Rashid contributed major sculptural and painted elements, often through ideas developed collectively rather than conventional commissions. The exterior became an abstract seascape and mural ecosystem, allowing the interior project to spill into the surrounding seafood district and helping generate The North Sea as a larger neighborhood work. Collaborators / contributors: Tony Brown; Sherry Walsh; Josh Beckman; Ivan Lee Mora; Umar Rashid / Frohawk Two Feathers; Stacey Lynn Smith; Jose Alvarado; Holly Vesecky; Design, Bitches; Parker Resnick Structural Engineering; additional builders and fabricators.

2019-present Aster Studios

Downtown Los Angeles Artist studios and showrooms developed inside a building originally constructed in 1898 as the Waldorf Hotel. Repurposed in 2019, the approximately 168 × 600 × 1200 in (427 × 1524 × 3048 cm) space became another adaptive-reuse environment in which the support structure for making art was itself treated as a design and architectural project. The build-out also provided the working context for the Rock Paintings and subsequent studio production. Collaborators / contributors: Jose Alvarado; Tony Brown; additional builders and studio occupants.

2020 Day / Night

Commissioned by David Morton of the Morton family for the DMK Railway Exchange Building, Chicago Two approximately eighteen-foot-wide paintings developed from photographs of sea-worn rock formations made in Careyes, Mexico. Installed as opposing works in a Chicago hospitality interior, one painting was conceived as Day and the other as Night. The paired commission extended the Rock Paintings into an architectural scale, allowing two related images to hold opposite sides of a room and alter the sense of place around them.

2021-present Desert Island

Rancho Mirage, California An ongoing site-scale landscape, hospitality and cultural project centered on the 1971 Desert Island Golf & Country Club. The property occupies roughly one half mile by one half mile and includes an eighteen-hole golf course, a twenty-eight-acre lake and a mature landscape of palms and desert vegetation. Nelson has approached the site as a long-duration environmental project in which architecture, landscape, club life, hospitality and future programming are considered as parts of one inhabitable composition.

2025-present Rudy Caballero

Ongoing collective fiction and shared-authorship platform Rudy Caballero is an imaginary artist brought into being through an expanding community of participants. Objects, installations, conversations, books, fragrances, tools, speculative products and social situations are developed collaboratively and attributed to Rudy rather than to any single maker. The project uses fictional identity to complicate conventional distinctions between authorship, collaboration, production, social exchange and ambition. Conversation is treated as both generative medium and archive: discussions are transcribed into Conversations Regarding the Spirit of Rudy Caballero, creating an expanding memory from which later works can emerge. Rudy is deliberately porous. Participants can enter the structure, contribute to it and temporarily become Rudy, while individual contributions remain credited through a transparent system of ideators, labor, manufacturing and support. Collaborators / contributors: An expanding network including Orly Anan, Josh Beckman, Tony Brown, Brian Butler, Chris Cichocki, Cameron Gainer, Francois Ghebaly, Chuck Moffitt, Umar Rashid / Frohawk Two Feathers, Magnus Resch, Helena von Hardenberg, Josh White, Miguel Nelson and many others.

February 3-8, 2025 Conversations Regarding the Spirit of Rudy Caballero | Volume One

Mexico City Preamble Exhibition, LOOT Gallery, Roma Norte, Mexico City; presented during Zona Maco 2025 The first public exhibition of the Rudy Caballero project. Visitors were invited to enter the collective persona through conversations conducted while lounging in a sculpted sectional sofa pit. Those discussions were transcribed and incorporated into Rudy's evolving archive. The exhibition brought together prototype artworks, speculative propositions, installation, conversation and participants as a temporary total environment. Rather than introducing a fixed fictional biography, it demonstrated Rudy as a mechanism through which collective thinking could acquire objects, language, reputation and memory.

2025–present Film Paintings

Los Angeles An ongoing body of large figurative paintings derived from fleeting, often unremarkable or difficult-to-identify moments photographed from films while watching them at home. The source images are chosen less for narrative importance than for the emotional charge of their arrangements: a body leaning, a cord stretching, a bag slouching on a shelf, a canoe drifting, a room holding its objects in a particular way. The images are projected loosely onto unprimed hemp as a provisional map. Nelson uses the projection to reduce the burden of drawing and to keep attention on the physical behavior of paint, pushing, wiping, dragging and smearing while allowing the weave of the hemp to interrupt the image. Palette, detail and information are freely altered rather than copied. The resulting paintings hover between recognition and disintegration. They retain the sense of being fragments from a larger sequence while resisting the authority of their cinematic sources. Objects and figures share psychological weight, and the paintings remain intentionally unresolved enough to suggest that neither the viewer nor the artist fully understands what has happened inside them.

2006 The New York Times

Coverage of Secret Restaurant, Los Angeles.

2009 LA Weekly

"LA People 2009: Social Chemists - Miguel Nelson and Sherry Walsh," Linda Immediato, April 22, 2009

2010 Dwell

Feature on Woolly Pocket and its vertical gardening system.

2011 Martha Stewart

Television feature on Woolly Pocket.