Nicole Appel

b. 1990 · Queens, New York, USA

She draws portraits with no faces in them: a person rendered entirely as the things they love, down to the mussels and the Russian boxes.

The life

Appel was born in 1990 and lives in Queens, New York. A self-taught artist on the autism spectrum, she has worked since 2016 at LAND Studio and Gallery, the Brooklyn studio for artists with developmental disabilities, where her densely packed coloured-pencil drawings quickly found collectors. Her work entered the Museum of Everything and KAWS collections, and featured in The Way I See It, drawn from the KAWS collection at the Drawing Center in New York in 2024.

The work

Coloured pencil on paper, every inch worked. Her signature Patchwork Portraits honour people in her life as an inventory of what they care about: Israeli flags and mussels for a shellfish-loving neighbour, animal eyes and Russian boxes for her ophthalmologist mother. Animals, travel and food jostle together in compositions that read as both catalogue and love letter.

Why we love them

Portraiture with the face swapped for the truth. She notices what people actually love, which is rarer than likeness.

Go deeper

• Nicole Appel at the Outsider Art Fair
• LAND Gallery
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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