I was born to one set of parents and adopted by another. I grew up always knowing I was adopted, yet I knew very little about my roots. I lived in the fantasies only children can invent — and through a closed adoption, those fantasies were always a plausible reality.
My studio practice traces how identity is shaped by relationships, systems, and histories — constructed through erasure, misrepresentation, or denial. As a transracially adopted Latina, I work with origins that are inaccessible, fragmented, decided by others. Rather than reconstruct a single coherent narrative, I hold contradiction, misalignment, and partial knowledge. The gap between lived experience and inherited narrative is the territory the work moves through, made visible across erasure drawing, multi-channel video with unsynced audio, ceramics, and works on paper.
In recent work, I have shifted from questions of identity toward the construction of place and belonging through the memories of others — most directly in attempting to render my paternal grandparents’ home in Monterrey, demolished before I was allowed to enter it. These efforts do not resolve into complete images or recovered narratives. They make the precariousness of reconstruction visible. I position identity not as something recovered or reclaimed, but as a condition continuously claimed, negotiated, and authored in relation to others.
Alongside my studio practice, I design and facilitate collective, co-creative work — convenings, sessions, scaffolded arcs that operate as clinical containers as much as artistic ones. Closed groups. Contained time. Each convening is built the way I build a clinical session: client-led, intuitive, pliable, structured to hold whatever emerges. The lineage runs through art therapy, group analytic traditions, somatic practice, and museotherapy. Within the museotherapy framework, I have developed and implemented a specific somatic protocol — pairing deep looking at artwork with embodied art-making — at LACMA, 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. I am not convening large publics around a thematic prompt. I am holding small containers for what is difficult to hold alone — disenfranchised grief, cultural disconnection, displacement, the kinds of loss that are hard to name.
My first solo exhibition, The sky broke when I was allowed to fly. / Se rompió el cielo cuando me dejaron volar., opens at LA Artcore in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, on May 16, 2026 — the first time my studio practice, ethnographic research, and clinical training are gathered into a single body of work rather than the parallel tracks they have occupied until now. Still Here, a free five-part community art series for Angelenos living with the impacts of the 2025 fires, follows at 18th Street Arts Center in 2027.
Nicole Rademacher is an interdisciplinary artist, Board Certified Art Therapist (ATR-BC), and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) whose work explores identity, memory, and belonging through participatory and process-based approaches. She has exhibited internationally at venues including Transmediale, LOOP Video Art Festival, Athens Digital Arts Festival, and the Los Angeles International Airport. She has facilitated her somatic protocol within museotherapy at LACMA, the Getty Research Institute, and the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art.
Rademacher holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred University. She later earned an MA in Marital and Family Therapy with a specialization in Clinical Art Therapy from Loyola Marymount University. This dual training informs a practice that bridges contemporary art and therapeutic frameworks, emphasizing embodied experience and relational dynamics.
Her work has been supported by organizations including the California Arts Council, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and 18th Street Arts Center. Recent projects include Being Adopted, a three-part participatory installation drawing on crowdsourced responses from 252 adoptees across 16 countries, and We Are Not Our Cruxes, a multi-part initiative on the mental health and lived experiences of adult adoptees and foster care alumni. Her debut solo exhibition, The sky broke when I was allowed to fly., opens at LA Artcore in May 2026 — a multimedia installation investigating authorship and constructed memory across media she has practiced for decades (video, drawing, installation) alongside ceramics, which she learned intentionally for the material’s specific relationship to memory and fragility. Rademacher lived and worked across Latin America and Spain for over a decade — including Santiago, Chile; Buenos Aires; and Barcelona — a period that continues to inform the transnational dimensions of her practice.
Alongside her studio practice, Rademacher designs collective convenings that pair somatic awareness with art-making, working with communities navigating disenfranchised grief, displacement, and cultural disconnection. She lives and works in Los Angeles.