Kole Nichols
Just Passing Through
2026 Edge Award Exhibition
April 2 - May 14
Just passing through
Natural dye, acrylic, and gel medium on canvas, 36 x 45 inches, 2025
Just Passing Through
Kole Nichols
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 2, 6 - 9 pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, May 2, 3 pm
The Swan Coach House Gallery is pleased to present the 2026 Edge Award exhibition, Just Passing Through, featuring winner, Kole Nichols. The exhibition opens on Thursday, April 2 from 6 - 9 pm and will be on view through May 14.
“Kole Nichols’ practice is a poetic inquiry encompassing cartographic and material investment. Though historically Nichols’ painting supports have included slate, steel, and paper, for Just Passing Through, Nichols foregrounds canvas.
Considering mapping, movement, and the cosmos, the work is a meditative dialogue between a material’s history and Nichols’ hand. Through creasing the primed material before adding layered planes of ground, he records memories of the physical stress on the surfaces. Formerly folded valleys deny pigmentation, joining and criss-crossing, forming linear radial patterns. Subtle, structural troughs contrast shapes accumulated by layering grisaille planes of dye and paint.
The works are at once both finite and expansive, inviting reflection on points in space and the chasms in between.”
Jodi Hays
Moonlight song
Acrylic, and gel medium on folded canvas, 9 x 12 inches, 2026
Kole Nichols
Kole Nichols (b. 1998) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work often utilizes the languages of drawing, painting, printmaking and installation as an expanded approach to art-making in order to navigate his conceptual interests. Born and raised in Alabama Nichols attended both the University of Alabama at Birmingham and The University of Alabama where he received his MFA. Currently, Nichols resides in Atlanta, Georgia where he works as both an artist and educator.
Recently Nichols’ work has consisted of the exploration of physical, spiritual, and emotional spaces. Through a process of internal reflection, he distorts familiar architectural motifs such as gates, windows, and doors into amalgamated compositions gathered from personal recollections both vague and vivid. Alongside these terrestrial thresholds, he mounts parallel explorations of non-physical boundaries through loose constructions of star fields, maps, and charts. It is through these endeavors that Nichols seeks to create pathways, markers, and structures to guide himself.
Recent Exhibitions in which Nichols has been featured include a solo show at Institute 193 (2025) Whitespace (2024), the Wiregrass Museum of Art (2023), The Gadsden Museum of Art (2023), and Hawkins Headquarters (2023). His work has also been included in recent group shows at the Wiregrass Museum of Art (2024), Johnson Lowe Gallery (2024), and Agnes Scott College (2024). Nichols is currently the recipient of the 2026 Forward Arts Foundation’s Edge Award.
Edge Award Finalists Demetri Burke, Crystal Jin Kim, Kimberly Fulton Orozco, and Visakha Jane Phillips will also present a work as part of the award exhibition in the front gallery space.
The Edge Award is a juried prize given annually by the Forward Arts Foundation (FAF) since 2000. The panel awards an early-career or under-recognized artist in the greater Atlanta area with a $10,000 cash prize, two-week Hambidge Center residency, and solo exhibition at the Swan Coach House Gallery. The voting panel is composed of an independent panel of Atlanta-area artists, educators, and administrators.
This Edge Award Exhibition is sponsored by the Hellen Ingram Plummer Foundation.
FAF is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the visual arts in Atlanta. Founded in 1965, FAF supports cultural programming and individual artists through grants and a variety of programs.