I am an interdisciplinary artist, Board Certified Art Therapist, and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. My work traces the structures through which identity is shaped by what is given, withheld, and granted late — through family, language, archives, institutions, and the accounts of others.
I was born to one set of parents and adopted by another. Raised through a closed, transracial adoption, I grew up separated from much of the family, language, and cultural inheritance that should have been available to me. The structure of adoption is one of the places the work begins, but the work does not attempt to repair it or reconstruct a single coherent narrative. I work with contradiction, misalignment, and partial knowledge — with origins that remain inaccessible, mediated, mistranslated, or decided by others.
Across video, drawing, installation, ceramics, language, and works on paper, the material logic of the work registers the limits of access. A gate admits and refuses. A filter removes what was native and adds something else in its place. Gesture says what speech will not. Erasure produces residue rather than disappearance. Porcelain registers pressure, breakage, and attempted holding. Image and sound refuse to synchronize into a single account. Translation drifts. Documents contradict one another, and none is allowed to win. These are not formal strategies applied to a subject. They are the subject: the mechanisms that decide what crosses, what is held back, and what is added on the far side.
Recent work extends these questions through place, inheritance, and distributed authorship. In attempting to render my paternal grandparents’ home in Monterrey — demolished before I was allowed to enter it — I work through photographs, oral histories, family memories, and accounts I did not live. The resulting images remain unstable and incomplete. Identity, under these terms, is not recovered or reclaimed. It is continuously claimed, negotiated, and authored in relation to others.
My clinical training shapes the ethical, somatic, and relational architecture of the practice without turning the art into therapy. It creates mechanisms for pacing, consent, embodied attention, grief, participation, and what can emerge when people make contact with difficult material. Alongside the studio work, I develop facilitated gatherings, participatory structures, and museotherapy protocols that bring deep looking, bodily awareness, and art-making into relation. I have implemented this work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Getty Research Institute.
This work is sometimes described as social practice, and that frame is partly accurate. What it can miss is the form. Participation is not sufficient on its own. The duration of an encounter, the structure of an invitation, what is withheld, who is permitted to speak, how authorship is distributed, and what remains for those who were not present are all conditions that determine form. The work makes room for what is difficult to hold alone without requiring disclosure or promising resolution.
My first solo exhibition, The sky broke when I was allowed to fly., / Se rompió el cielo cuando me dejaron volar., brought the visual, ethnographic, and clinical structures of the practice together for the first time. During installation, the work began to exceed the plan. Borrowed bricks became building material. Ceramics that had not made the cut were broken so they could join their fragmented cousins. I wrote Ersilia in pencil near the entrance, slightly out of order, and began to treat the entire gallery as that city of relations rather than as a room containing separate works. Each time I returned to the space, I changed something.
The freedom of the exhibition — some of it offered and some of it self-granted — allowed play to enter the work differently. Through that play, a through line became visible across materials and across years: gates, filters, gestures, erasures, mistranslations, fragments, contradictory records, and structures that admit, refuse, alter, or hold. The exhibition did not send the work in a new direction so much as make visible what had been holding it together all along.
CV
Nicole Rademacher is an interdisciplinary artist, Board Certified Art Therapist (ATR-BC), and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) based in Los Angeles. She works across video, drawing, installation, ceramics, participatory structures, and facilitated gathering. Her work has been presented internationally at Transmediale, LOOP Video Art Festival, Athens Digital Arts Festival, and Los Angeles International Airport. She has developed and facilitated a somatic protocol within museotherapy at LACMA, the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Getty Research Institute. Her clinical training informs the ethical, somatic, and relational architecture of the work without turning the work into therapy.
Recent projects include Being Adopted, a three-part participatory installation drawing on responses from 252 adopted adults across 16 countries, and We Are Not Our Cruxes, a multi-part project focused on the lived experiences of adopted adults and people who grew up in foster care. In 2026, Rademacher presented her debut solo exhibition, The sky broke when I was allowed to fly. / Se rompió el cielo cuando me dejaron volar., at LA Artcore in Los Angeles. She is currently developing Still Here, a five-part community art series at 18th Street Arts Center for Angelenos living with the ongoing effects of the 2025 fires.
Rademacher holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred University, and an MA in Marital and Family Therapy with a specialization in Clinical Art Therapy from Loyola Marymount University. Her work has been supported by the California Arts Council, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Recovery Fund through 18th Street Arts Center. She lived and worked across Latin America and Spain for more than a decade, including Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Barcelona. She lives and works in Los Angeles.