Nicole Wittenberg

Nicole Wittenberg was born in San Francisco in 1979 and raised in the Bay Area. She began going outside to draw flowers at the age of 4 or 5, and was greatly impressed with paintings by Matisse, which she saw at around age 7.

Wittenberg received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003. She taught at the New York Studio School, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University in Brooklyn and was a professor in the Critical Theory Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2017.

She has been living and working in her studio in New York for about 25 years and has a second studio in Maine, where she continues to go outside and create plein-air, pastel drawings of flowers. She uses those drawings as studies for her larger paintings and prints. “I make very quick drawings of them in about 15 or 20 minutes,” she said in a 2025 interview. “The drawings function as visual notes about how I’m feeling [while] looking at those flowers at that time of day, on that day. They’re personal. I show them sometimes, and I make a lot of them, yet not all of them become paintings. They have a sense of scale, color and form.”

Nicole Wittenberg’s works are included in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim, the Farnsworth, Portland and Colby College Museums in Maine, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, the Boston Museum, the Albertina in Vienna, the Aishti Foundation in Beirut and other major venues around the world. 

References:

Grace Edquist. Nicole Wittenberg’s Sweeping Landscapes Take Root at Acquavella. Vogue. October 15, 2025.

Jason Stopa. Nicole Wittenberg by Jason Stopa/Painting visceral experience. Bomb. July 4, 2025.

Katy Diamond Hamer. On resisting the pressure of productivity culture. The Creative Independent. July 2, 2025.

Chris Crosman. Nicole Wittenberg. The Brooklyn Rail/Art Seen. June 2025.

Nicole Wittenberg. Critics page. The Brooklyn Rail. December 9th, 2015.