About
About
Nicholas Wisniewski (b.1982, Essex, Maryland) is an artist and builder working in Baltimore City. Through physical and social sculpture, he has pursued career-long questions of how we inhabit space, how we construct the city, and the economic, political, and practical stakes of both. Whether carving into drywall or erecting it, Wisniewski uses the materials and mechanisms of the built environment to challenge forces of neglect and to nurture a cautious optimism about the possibilities of repair.
After studying painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (BFA, 2004), Wisnewski and early collaborators with a shared interest in social practice founded Camp Baltimore and later the Baltimore Development Cooperative (BDC). These collectives were vehicles for interventionist actions that eventually—in the form of Participation Park, a squatted community garden and social space in East Baltimore’s Johnston Square—grew into longer term occupations. As part of BDC, Wisniewski was awarded the Sondheim Prize in 2009. He has presented work at the Contemporary, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Creative Time Summit (2009), the Venice Biennale (2012), and Documenta 13; his work has been written about in the Baltimore Sun, Bmore Art, the City Paper, Art in America, and UCLA’s Critical Planning Journal.
In 2010, along with artist-collaborators, Wisniewski founded the Compound in East Baltimore Midway. Through many iterations, the Compound remains a space for genre-straying cultural production and experimentation.
Artist Statement
This current body of work began with a desire to peel back and look behind—to understand the materials that construct both physical spaces and the conceptual space of, for instance, the gallery. I started cutting into my paintings to reveal the wall behind. Then the wall itself became the medium.
As my understanding of the forces of disinvestment and planned neglect in Baltimore City grew, the vacant row house became an unignorable symbol and eventually site of intervention. Entering an empty building, I would remove a slab of drywall to my studio, etch an image of the facade into the gypsum, and eventually return it. This obviously futile act of repair was a vehicle to understand the condition Baltimore was in, and that I was in.
Last year, in what began as a pessimistic retreat from my socially oriented projects, I returned to my studio and to these pieces. Almost 15 years later, I am less interested in the self-reflexive gesture of my original process—the art as an artifact of the building. I’ve started to depict not only the building itself but the structures people have added to reinforce or reconstruct it: scaffolding, bracing, underpinning. These sincere, often failed, acts of repair or simple attention are evidence of a negotiated but enduring utopianism.
Nick Wisniewski
C.V.
WORK EXPERIENCE
2010 – Director, The Compound, Inc 501c3
Co-Founder and manager of operations: live entertainment venue and bar, programming, and affordable live-work spaces for artists.
2002 – Owner, Phrame Inc. Fine Art Services
Manages all company operations: Hiring, training, frame production, art handling, and administration for private collectors, museums, galleries, and corporate clients throughout the country.
EDUCATION
2004 BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD
PROJECTS & EXHIBITIONS
2024 Just Below the Surface, solo show curated by Derrick Adams at Swann House Gallery, Hotel Ulysses, Baltimore, MD
The Stars are Aligned / The Time is Now, group exhibition at The Bishop Gallery & Richard Beavers Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2014 Alternative Press Center, Opening at Compound, Baltimore, MD
Compound, 2200 Kirk Ave, Baltimore, MD
2013 Host, curated by Baltimore Development Cooperative, Baltimore, MD
Compound, 2200 Kirk Ave, Baltimore, MD
2012 Spontaneous Interventions, Venice Biennale US Pavilion : Architecture
Host, Baltimore Development Cooperative, Baltimore, MD
2011 Compound, 2200 Kirk Ave, Baltimore, MD
2010 Compound, 2200 Kirk Ave, Baltimore, MD
The Food Network, Creative Alliance, Baltimore, MD
Stew, 2640 Space, Baltimore, MD
Project 20, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD
2004 Cram Sessions, Baltimore Museum of Art
PUBLICATIONS
2010 “Interview with Nicholas Wisniewski, Scott Berzofsky, and Dane Nester”, Farm Together Now, by Amy Franceschini and Daniel Tucker, Chronicle Books LLC
2007 “Listening, Collaboration, Solidarity,” Critical Planning, Volume 14, UCLA Department of Urban Planning
2006 “Notes for an Oppositional Urbanism,” introduction by Michael Rakowitz, Surface Tension Supplement No.1, Errant Bodies Press
LECTURES & PANEL DISCUSSIONS
2013 Artist Talk, “A public discussion on artist initiatives that impact their world” moderated by Green Acres author Sue Spaid, Red Emmas, Baltimore, MD
2012 Artist Panel, “Compound”, And And And, Curated by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany
Artist Talk, “What is this thing we live In”, moderated by Andy Shanker, Compound, Baltimore, MD
Artist Talk, “Schizodesign—Experimental Cartography in the City”, professor Hugh Pocock, MICA Brown Center, Baltimore, MD
2011 Artist Talk, “Sustainability and Social Practice,” MICA professor Hugh Pocock, Compound, Baltimore, MD
2010 “Rethinking Our Behavioral Norms”, Open City: Lecture Series, curated by Daniel Deoca, MICA Brown Center, Baltimore, MD
Artist Talk, “Sustainability and Social Practice,” professor Hugh Pocock, Compound, Baltimore, MD
2009 Co-Presenter, “Trespassers, Squatters and Interventionists,” The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, curated by Nato Thompson, The New York Public Library
Artist Talk, “Spaces for Revolution,” The University of Trash, organized by Michael Cataldi and Nils Norman, Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY
AWARDS
2012 Community Greening Grant, Parks and People Foundation
Baltimore Blue Water Foundation Grant
2011 Community Greening Grant, Parks and People Foundation
2009 The Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize- First Place Award, Baltimore Development Cooperative
Neighborhood Mobilization Grant, The Baltimore Community Foundation
Neighborhood Greening Grant, Parks & People Foundation
2008 Individual Artist Award, Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts,
2007 Trawick Prize – Second Place Award
SELECTED PRESS & REVIEWS
2025 Art Forum Critic’s Pick Baltimore, Teri Henderson
2023 Bmore Art Urban Upcycling with Neighborhood Design Center, Michael Anthony Farley
2018 Baltimore Sun https://www.baltimoresun.com/2018/04/28/jacques-kelly-kirk-avenues-compound-an-artists-commune-in-need-of-some-work/
2012 Spontaneous intervention http://www.spontaneousinterventions.org/project/participation-park
2009 Art in America, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/participation-park-baltimore-development-cooperative-scores-sondheim-prize-57784/
2009 Cathy Lebowitz, “Propaganda in the Garden,” Art in America, Oct. Issue
Blake Gopnik, “An Ark and a Park,” The Washington Post, Sunday, August 2, Laura Vozzella, “City Farming Becomes a Social Cause,” The Baltimore Sun, July 20
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, “The Sondheim and Social Justice,” Urban Palimpsest
Kriston Capps, “Participation Park: Baltimore Development Cooperative Scores Sondheim Prize,” Art in America, July 14
“Interview with Organizers of The City from Below,” The Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, March 26
Martin L. Johnson, “City Rights,” City Paper, March 25
2008 Alyssa Dennis, “Participation Park: Where Art and Politics Meet, goforchange.com
2007 Bert Stabler, “Pedagogical Factory Ponders more Intimate, Creative Approaches to Education,” The Chicago Reader
2006 Bret McCabe, “Unite and Conquer: Brief Notes on a Project for Revolution in Baltimore,” City Paper, July 12