about

grand rapids, january 2008

Maureen Nollette began her career as an artist. After receiving her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA in NYC, she taught art for several years in the New York City public school system through two museum sponsored programs. It is while teaching art that she began to day dream about greener pastures, literally.

Having midwestern roots, Ms.Nollette’s longing for the smell and feel of fresh grass not found in her Brooklyn neighborhood propelled her to begin growing grass in unconventional places, such as table tops. Soon a line of furniture was created. Recognizing that she loved manufacturing and business as well as art, she sought a more commercial outlet for her talents and began nollette studio.

Ms. Nollette created her design studio in Brooklyn, NY in 1998. A line of furniture, the first effort of her studio, received quite a bit of acclaim in the industry. Nollette studio’s furniture was a beautifully simple, minimal line pairing the coolness of modernism with the natural, raw beauty of concrete. 

She now carries her minimalist aesthetic to her first collection of prints and drawings, ordinary objects. Her artwork has created a new category in home décor: an art/design hybrid. It is here that Ms. Nollette‘s expertise as an object maker—her appreciation for placement, perspective and proportion—now crosses back over into the realm of art making, where she also considers the image as a symbol, and its emotional resonance.

Longing for greener pastures once again, the studio recently relocated to Michigan where Ms. Nollette currently lives and works in a 1963 ranch house with her husband, two sons and one cat.