Early Life (1989)
Kerin Nicole Bowen was born at the end of the 80s on the East Coast to young, creative parents, her Italian-Irish father and Russian-English mother. Her birth was coaxed along by a midwife calming her mother in the water, mirroring a lifelong theme: learning to integrate her dense inner world with the external, as expressed in her work that moves between the city and the sea.
Nicky grew up witnessing the contradictions of middle-class American life: from the psychic and familial aftermath of war and the Great Depression to migration, the pursuit of the American Dream clashing with addiction and mental illness. Sensitive and perceptive, she absorbed everything, and would pour her desire to heal into a career in complementary health and what critics describe as a “simultaneously creative and healing” art practice.
At age six, she met her most formative and lifelong art teacher. Backed by her inspiring enthusiasm, Nicky was making pocket money and a name for herself as the go-to “sign-maker”, hand-lettering alphabets for classmates and hand-writing lessons for teachers by age twelve.
During her teenage years, Nicky leaned into her passion for creative writing and poetry, while her art gravitated “to the streets”—on walls, signs for football games, cut-outs for school dances, signs for friends. Thus emerged the independent spirit she would carry with her to New York.
Her parallel career in complementary health and hospitality, especially restaurants, shaped her worldview as a young adult. Now, twenty years after working closely with the human body under everything from extreme sickness to vibrant health, contrasted with the whirlwind of restaurant life, she has an unusual understanding of human behavior which serves as the foundation for all of her work.
Life as a Painter in New York (2013)
Nicky’s formal entry into the New York art world came in 2014 with a show at 905 Madison Avenue, where she made her first major sale. In 2016, she took her art to the streets of SoHo, selling paintings at the corner of Prince & Greene after a gallerist rejected her work and suggested she do so. The very first morning, she made her second major sale, showing her that she could build a career without depending on the traditional gallery system.
Nicky went on to host “Surrender”, an experimental, participatory art show in Brooklyn, to paint a public community mural in Denver that invited all who wanted to paint to contribute, and contribute to many other community-based shows. She has spent her time in the city living and working with artists from musicians and writers to videographers and fellow painters, each adding a layer of depth to her work and encouraging her to experiment with new methods.
Nicky’s art thrives across many mediums, especially bold & colorful signage, watercolor, clay paint, and scroll construction. Her work is defined by emotional precision and the rejection of conformity, spanning wildlife, abstraction, minimalism, solitude, coastal shapes, and the occasional controversial interpretation of American society. Beneath it all is the obsession with visually describing the details and feeling of life, with the new added dimension of video through her new cinema-quality camera.
Crafting Restaurant Signage (2020)
Alongside her fine art practice, Nicky created NYCKY, a hand-painted signage practice serving New York City restaurants. Regularly painting for Bubby’s Tribeca, NYCKY has been expanding to the likes of The Vital Shoppe in Crown Heights and Franklin Chthonics.
With two decades of experience in hospitality, she understands the pulse of a kitchen, the effort behind each plate of food, the invisible labor, the humor and exhaustion and pride. Her signs aren’t just decorative, but masterfully communicate the soul of the place. She paints each sign intentionally and by hand, honoring her mantra that if the food is made by humans, the signs should be too.
NYCKY has produced work for restaurants across the city, from menu boards to chalkboards, sidewalk tents, brand art, directional signage, and expressive food illustrations. Her style is recognizable as warm, inviting, and precise without being sterile. Her signs are a defining part of her artistic identity: a bridge between fine art and everyday New York experience, a living archive of the city’s food culture.
A New World of Inspiration (2025)
Nicky’s hammerhead paintings took life at the end of three self-led residencies in La Paz, Baja California Sur in May 2025, September 2025, and December 2025-January 2026. She spent her days in Baja diving, driving, painting, and learning all she could about the Sea of Cortez and surrounding nature. The hammerheads emerged first on Christmas Day; fast and instinctive, as if surfacing from the subconscious.
Her new diver’s eye and encounters especially with the movement of sharks changed her sense of form. Hammerheads unexpectedly became symbols of intuition, mythology, growth, and clarity: expressed as reductive silhouettes with emotional charge.
From this period evolved her ongoing Baja Catalogue, a body of work including the hammerheads, desert-inspired palettes, fluid landscapes, and minimal ink drawings. The Baja work marks the most expansive chapter in her career and is increasingly recognized as her signature visual language, created nearby the environment most suited to her true nature: the water.
Nicky now divides her creative attention between New York and Baja Sur, building a dual home base. In 2026 and beyond, her focus is making her work more accessible to collectors, developing her poetry into physical books, deepening her painting practice in the wild, and expanding NYCKY Restaurant Signs as a cultural contribution to the city she loves.