https://www.nikkischaffer.com/podcasts daily 0.75 2026-02-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/1636241105503-PDNPS3NBOGSI4BVEBF3K/candles.jpg Audio https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/1636242978679-GAPWOB4C15M2WTGXPAM2/candles.jpg Audio https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/1646349357916-56BFQAEI7G05A9OEJAQB/flower.jpg Audio https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/1646419658418-TM2XX7GSR43NPB030YM5/unhacked.jpg Audio https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/1657644902588-HUYNTHVDYPHK16UR4BBP/halftone.jpg Audio https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/61c202c7-ad59-454a-a208-0a783ce38d52/Block+by+Block.png Audio https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/1768595445440-YEIE6KT4LRR7L0V5RO7G/unsplash-image-2y8ZKvXFvGc.jpg Audio https://www.nikkischaffer.com/contact daily 0.75 2022-08-30 https://www.nikkischaffer.com/words daily 0.75 2022-08-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/755882ab-f9e2-4430-b49d-64701a710600/136488602_676950392984958_5931790660321631363_n.jpg Published Articles "When I look at Abelardo Morell’s 'Camera Obscura: Night View of Philadelphia From Loews Hotel Room #3013,' I am touched by a multitude of realities. Transforming his hotel room into a pinhole camera, Morell produces an overlay image by letting light from the world outside enter through a small hole in a dark room. In many ways, this reversed Philadelphia skyline feels symbolic of the countless challenges we have faced in 2020.⁠ ⁠ As we enter a new year, our collective grief under the pandemic—the devastating losses, missed milestones, and unremitting inconveniences—remain with us. Holding each other through this space and time, I hope we share what truths have emerged to guide us all into deeper connection. Morell employs a little human ingenuity to create his overlapping worlds without taking a step outside his door. Here, his skyline beckons: it is a call for us to look inward, across our vast inner space of thoughts and imagination, to create within the rooms we already occupy. Everything we need is already inside of us."⁠ https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/a9deb83f-ece3-456c-bfa3-efa52311c0ac/109478685_1056292101434615_267325598177672972_n.jpg Published Articles “It has been 26 years since the opening of Chris Burden’s 1994 exhibition, ‘L.A.P.D. Uniforms,’ yet the deep significance of this work will always fall hardest on Black bodies. For a nation with a long history of racial violence towards Black Americans, today’s intergenerational and multicultural modern-day civil rights movement has finally given voice to a collective pain.⁠ ⁠ ‘L.A.P.D. Uniforms’ is an edition of 30 Los Angeles Police Department uniforms, fully equipped with regulation belt, holster, baton, handcuffs, 92F Beretta handgun, and a copy of the official badge. Burden proposed this project soon after the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which were precipitated by the acquittal of LA police officers accused of unnecessarily beating Rodney King—an event captured on videotape and repeatedly played on news stations throughout the world.⁠ ⁠ After extensive research, Burden and FWM created an enlarged prototype for the wool uniforms, which were then custom-made by the company that manufactures the L.A.P.D.’s actual shirts and pants. Designed to fit a 7’4” inch officer, the uniforms are installed with the outstretched sleeve of one uniform almost touching the next. As America aims to address the failings of our criminal justice system and the racist structures underpinning our society, we must continue to question the nature of authority. Encircling the perimeter of the exhibition space, the repeating uniforms are not about the rogue cop, but the flawed design of an entire system.”⁠ https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/1638239920729-PXGYP6W9SN4ZYNIO6OBY/103416449_148730533407944_3175133256335091554_n.jpg Published Articles "With the use of tear gas being indiscriminately deployed upon demonstrators protesting the deaths of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, the aftermath of this visual violence seeps into our bodies and homes, becoming a part of our collective conscience. Banned during warfare since the 1925 Geneva Protocol, clouds of tear gas work by activating pain receptors in the body, while also causing emotional and psychological distress. Law enforcement in the United States has a long history of using tear gas to suppress protests by unions, anti-war demonstrators, and civil rights activists, most recently, of the Black Lives Matter movement. As we question when, if ever, it is justifiable to use civilians as legitimate targets of brutality, we often turn to art in an effort to understand these feelings and memories of violence. Former Artist-in-Residence Yukinori Yanagi collaborated with FWM in 1995 to make 'The Forbidden Box,' an installation of two large-scale prints depicting the mushroom cloud created by the explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. Yanagi selected the image from a 1946 Japanese newspaper, overlaying the cloud with an excerpt from Article 9 of Japan’s postwar constitution printed in English and Japanese. Drafted by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, the excerpt renounces the nation’s right to use military force. Below lies an open lead box with “Little Boy”—the name of the bomb—engraved on its lid. As Yanagi alludes to the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box, in which the first human woman releases sickness, death, and other unspecified evils into the world, Americans must grapple with the consequences of traumatic violence embedded in the psyche of our nation." -Nikki Schaffer, FWM Visitor Services Assistant https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/ddc3bcbb-5ed1-4c83-a356-d7b5cb552a83/129303863_1088277044935706_8909568221175112889_n.jpg Published Articles "Found objects often speak to our felt sense of reality, evoking powerful memories that inform how we perceive and relate to the world. Created as a site-specific work for the exhibition "Prison Sentences: The Prison as Site, The Prison as Subject" at Philadelphia’s now-abandoned @easternstate, "5 to 10" is Willie Cole’s poignant examination of the futility and loss that accompanies imprisonment.⁠ ⁠ The installation gains its power from the simplicity of its materials—used and broken playground equipment—which are placed in suggestive arrangements: a swing set leans against the prison wall, the row of swings pressed to the hard stone as if in a firing line; a series of basketball nets are hung 30 feet high on the prison’s outer wall, across from the prison’s former Death Row and far too high to ever be used for play; a sandbox is littered with pairs of children’s sneakers, turned sole side up.⁠ ⁠ Incarcerating more people per capita than any country in the world, the US prison system has historically been a deeply unequal and inhumane space, continuing the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In the wake of mass protests against state authority, culminating in one of the largest civil rights movements the US has ever seen, we must recognize that Black Americans are disproportionately thrown into the deep end of our inequitable justice system. At a time when we are reimagining the world we want to live in, what would our communities look like if we prioritized systems of care, rather than punishment?"⁠ ⁠ “Print As Impression” reflection contributed by Nikki Schaffer, FWM Visitor Services Assistant⁠ https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/54ce4ca8-0163-4dae-a8b3-b9157f374f7a/97521362_956131311512228_3811724294935630567_n.jpg Published Articles PRINT AS ENVIRONMENT: Jorge Pardo, Untitled, 1999. “As I spend more time at home, rooms I used to pass through now encapsulate my existence. In this close-up world, ordinary objects—like windowsills and creaky stairwells—appear beautiful, and I find myself developing a deeper, more meaningful connection to the physical spaces I inhabit. Jorge Pardo, a former FWM Artist-in-Residence, was commissioned to redesign the entrance of The Fabric Workshop and Museum in 1997. During this time, he radically transformed the public spaces within the Museum, creating a new reception area and a video lounge/café, including his own teacups with saucers. For his Untitled project, he created two new fabrics inspired by 1950s and 60s-era textile design, which were made into room dividers, wallpaper, and window curtains. As an artist and sculptor, Pardo creates environments that blur boundaries between art and design, making us question what we perceive to be art, and where we expect to find it." -Nikki Schaffer, FWM Visitor Services Assistant https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6147e413ce2b837f791270af/97cb7ec1-72f0-4e07-88cd-370047fdfeb0/Trenton+Tree.jpg Published Articles ⁠"Imagine an alternate world where whimsical creatures are interlocked in an eternal battle between good and evil. At the center of this mythology are gentle Mounds, the plant-animal mutants that live in the forest and communicate through dreams. Their natural antagonists, the color-blind Vegans, dwell in an underworld, feeding on tofu, and plotting their next attack on the passive Mounds.⁠ ⁠ These narratives enter the mind of artist Trenton Doyle Hancock in flashes, “like visions,” and are inspired by superhero comics, pulp fiction, and biblical stories learned from his religious upbringing. His characters embody themes of life and death, love, authority, spirituality, and moral relativism. ⁠ ⁠ Since childhood, Hancock’s sentient Mounds have informed his artistic practice, acting as a repository for a shared history and future of humankind: “Mounds are museums...but also basements, living rooms, memories, and, most importantly, our collective understanding.” ⁠ ⁠ Image: Trenton Doyle Hancock, Good Vegan Progression #5, 2007. Hand-cut synthetic, natural, and digitally printed fabric layered and stitched on fire-retardant theater curtain. 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