Hello! I’m Nicole Lavelle and I’m an artist, designer, and writer working on social, cultural, and community projects. 


I’m booking projects for November and December 2023! Learn more here.

︎ nicolelavelle@gmail.com

Art projects ︎︎︎ Green River Publications

Green River Publications


From 2012 to 2016, I visted the small rural desert town of Green River, Utah once a year to create socially engaged projects. Three publications emerged from this repeat visiting—The Green River Newspaper, The Green River Magazine, and Interstate Works—each made in collaboration with town residents.

Collaborator: Sarah Baugh
Part of Epicenter’s Frontier Fellowship







The Green River Magazine embraced long-form content and expanded to include out-of-town contributors from Epicenter’s artist network, in addition to local contributors. We reported on the annual Melon Days, and the monthly meeting of the Planning and Zoning Committee.
We included an entire Power Point presentation about a proposed nearby nuclear power plant. We featured a visiting artist’s years-long photography project. We interviewed the town elders: an historian, a librarian, and a melon family matriarch.

This project was funded by a Sappi: Ideas that Matter grant.


Interstate Works is a meditation on the cross-county Interstate 80, which runs right through town. It features an interview with a female truck driver, youth meditations on country music, and portraits of people with their cars taken at the local gas station as part of the arts festival High Desert Test Sites. With newsprint guts and a glossy cover, it was designed to evoke those free tractors-for-sale classified publications you pick up at the truckstop restaurant.

This project was funded by an ArtPlace America grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.


This work was foundational to my art practice. Green River began my interest in the complexity of visiting and stirred a dedication to creating layered “deep maps” (William Least Heat-Moon) as a way to understand the complexity of place.




Contact:
nicolelavelle@gmail.com


I live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, on unceded Coast Miwok and Karkin Ohlone land.