@luminous_public_artist | nikolassorengoodich.com | luminouscommunitycenter.org | CV
Nikolas Soren Goodich b. 1969
A mixed-race native of Los Angeles, Nikolas’s black grandfather, William, was the grandson of a previously enslaved preacher in Alabama, and Nikolas’s Jewish grandfather, also named William, escaped genocidal pogroms in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1911, to find sanctuary in NYC. Nikolas attended RISD, BSMFA, and SAIC, finally earning his BFA in Painting and Printmaking from VCU Arts in 2019. In 2011, after a nightmare decade of drug addiction, he became homeless, eventually forced to live out on the streets of Los Angeles for over a year. He now celebrates over nine years of sobriety. This deeply transformative life experience informs both his studio and his public art practice. Thus, in his luminous layered glass paintings and in his public art vision, he explores questions of identity, issues of social and racial justice, portraiture, healing from toxic behaviors, and ideas from critical theory, linguistics, neuroscience, consciousness studies, and physics. His TED talk in November 2022 for TEDx Boston’s inaugural Planetary Stewardship event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab was entitled Can Luminous Public Art Save Us From Ourselves. In November 2023 he gave an extended version of the talk at Richmond, Virginia’s Institute of Contemporary Art museum for their VCUarts Lecture Series. He was the first alumni of VCU’s School of the Arts ever chosen for that honor. Nikolas is represented by Dot Red in Los Angeles, and Chiefs and Spirits Gallery in The Hague, Netherlands, with work in collections in the USA, Japan, UK, EU, Canada, and Brazil.
