About the Artist

Nandi Makala

Nandi Makala works at the intersection of painting and textile art — a space she did not discover so much as inherit. Born in Paris and raised in the Southwest of France, with roots extending to the Republic of the Congo and Ivory Coast, she grew up surrounded by a multiplicity of colors, textures, and traditions that would take decades of formal training to fully translate into art. Her triangulated heritage — European, Central African, West African — is not background detail. It is the structural foundation of everything she makes. Her education was deliberate and wide-ranging. She studied ceramics in Limoges, absorbing the ancient discipline of working with earth and fire. At the National School of Fine Arts in Angers, she earned her diploma in Textile and Tapestry Art, grounding herself in the technologies of thread and surface. An Interior Decoration degree from LISAA Fashion School in Paris followed, sharpening her eye for how objects inhabit space and how materials communicate beyond their function. These were not sequential steps toward a career — they were years of learning how to listen to what things are made of. Then came the years that turned craft into calling. At Marie Claire Home in Paris, she served as assistant to the Editor-in-Chief, learning how luxury speaks through texture and restraint. At Hermès, she crafted handbags and porcelain plates — work demanding the kind of precision where a single imperfect stitch undoes an entire object's integrity. This formation in luxury craft did not merely influence her art practice. It became its foundation. When Makala stitches gold thread into canvas today, she does so with the exacting hand of someone who once made objects designed to last generations. Her mature work synthesizes all of it. She builds surfaces in layers — beginning with acrylic or oil, then introducing embroidery, crochet, and stitching directly into the painted ground. Gold arrives in multiple forms: thread, leaf, pigment, each carrying different qualities of light and weight. The process is intuitive in its unfolding but deliberate in its execution. Materials are allowed to speak; forms are allowed to emerge. The result is abstraction that feels inevitable — each raised surface, each embedded thread, holding something that cannot be reduced to description. Three themes anchor everything: Origins, Memory, and Resilience. The first draws her gaze upward — to stars, the cosmos, sacred geometries that precede and outlast human time. The second pulls inward — to the female body, to the textures of personal and ancestral experience. The third holds the tension between them: the capacity to persist, to carry forward, to transform what endures into pattern. Gold is the connective tissue — light materialized, history made visible, the eternal given tactile form. Now based in Santa Fe and an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Makala has exhibited internationally from New York to London, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, bringing to each room surfaces that demand to be felt as much as seen.