Erika Nelson
Artist and Educator (Lucas, Kansas)
Session: Spectacular Failures: How Changing The Way You Think About Failure Can Breathe New Life Into Artistic Processes. (3:45 – 5:00 pm)
Erika Nelson is an independent artist and educator, exploring contemporary art forms in the public realm. While living in a vehicle for two years, she explored the nooks and crannies of the United States seeking out the odd and unusual, gathering stories of people who build Outsider Art Environments, as well as Roadside Vernacular Architecture known as World’s Largest Things.
She developed her own traveling roadside attraction and museum featuring The World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things, settling in Lucas Kansas in a house adjacent to S.P. Dinsmoor’s visionary folk art site The Garden of Eden. She now serves as the Garden of Eden’s Cultural Resources Director, a field representative for the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission serving rural Kansas counties, a Humanities Kansas speaker, and visionary art site conservator.
Her artwork manifests itself in a series of interesting, innovative, engaging public art projects that incorporate Art into the Everyman’s everyday experience.