3. Nesting
Nesting
A solo exhibition showcasing work made by Natalie Collette Wood during her residency at Sugar Hill Museum.
Featuring Natalie Collette Wood
Curated by Jesse Bandler Firestone
Sugar Hill Museum, June 7 - August 27, 2025
Highlighted in Whitehot Magazine
Conceived during the artist’s residency at Sugar Hill Museum and shaped by her experience of pregnancy, Nesting leans into the biological impulse to build, adorn, and protect—a drive shared across species, histories, and homes. Birds, with their flamboyance, musicality, and instinct to create shelter, are a key inspiration. For Wood, the nest becomes not just a place of comfort, but a method of worldbuilding.
Nesting presents sculpture, painting, and installation that collage real and imagined spaces where humans, nature, and creative processes intersect and take root. Wood’s sculptural installations, made from found and fabricated objects, frame nesting as an ongoing negotiation between interior and exterior life.
Wood’s dreamlike paintings imagine lush, surreal interiors animated by plants, animals, and human presence. Separately, she draws inspiration from The Nest, a historic Harlem jazz club that welcomed non-segregated audiences and became a haven for Black expression. There, music and costume transformed performance into collective shelter—improvised, relational, and alive.
Grounded in the integrated vision of Broadway Housing Communities—which brings together affordable housing, early childhood education, and the arts via The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, Wood invites us to consider how we create spaces—both physical and emotional—that hold vulnerability, care, and transformation.
Across these works, Nesting blurs the boundaries between the intimate and the social, the bodily and the ecological—inviting us to imagine how we make space for life, for inspiration, and for one another.